Introduction: The Limits of Existing Frameworks

How does music function in contexts of nationalist conflict? A large interdisciplinary literature has developed robust tools for analyzing music’s political effects, including in settings marked by instability, displacement, and violence (Redmond Reference Redmond2014; Tausig Reference Tausig2019; Hemmasi Reference Hemmasi2020; Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg2024). John Street’s Music and Politics (2012) offers a broad map of music’s political entanglements: states may deploy music through propaganda, cultural policy, and censorship, while musicians and publics use sound to express, contest, and mobilize identities. Following Laing (Reference Laing, Shepherd, Horn, Laing, Oliver and Wicke2003), Street (Reference Street2012, 45) distinguishes “protest music” as explicit opposition from more coded “music of resistance,” noting that politics may reside even in the act of singing. Protest declares its target openly; resistance encodes it for those positioned to decode it. Both presume performers who choose what to sing — an assumption the cases below unsettle.

Foundational distinctions help clarify why music matters in collective life. Turino (Reference Turino2008, 2–3) differentiates participatory from presentational performance, showing how collective singing can generate “synchrony”: alignment of bodies, voices, and affect that produces felt unity and belonging. In the cases below, the two modes collide: presentational performance met demands for participatory affirmation — requests, coins, communal song — making the audience’s response as politically legible as the music itself. Attali (Reference Attali and Massumi1985, 6) similarly theorizes sound and power as mutually constitutive, framing music as bound up with ordering and subversion.

Drott’s (Reference Drott2023, 1) field review charts protest music studies across disciplines and highlights affect, protest soundscapes, media ecosystems, and the contradictory effects of protest musicking; he stresses that musicking can fail movements or even harm them (2023, 16–18) — by alienating publics, substituting expressive catharsis for strategic action, or papering over internal divisions, failure measured against a movement’s own aims. Ethnographic studies likewise show that mobilization often operates through embodied practice rather than lyrical content: Hofman (Reference Hofman2020, 97) demonstrates that activist choirs can work through “somatic means,” while her “radical amateurism” captures how political communities form through collective musicking (2020, 100–102), as in the post-Yugoslav left’s self-organized choirs. Tausig (Reference Tausig2019, 4, 7) shows how dissident sounding is constrained and channeled by its political environment, requiring careful navigation of what can be heard, where, and by whom.

This scholarship provides a sophisticated account of music as affective, mediated, and constrained political practice. Yet when applied to civil conflict and deeply polarized historical societies, three recurrent problems emerge.

First, the modes of musical politics often treated as analytically distinct — state propaganda, censorship, and grassroots dissent — frequently converge on the same sonic object in conflict settings. A single partisan hymn can simultaneously amplify ideology for sympathetic listeners, invite suppression by opponents, and operate as defiant practice for targeted publics. I term this simultaneity the triple valence of partisan music. Street’s observation that music becomes politically salient when it acquires an “offensive” character to those with power to respond (2012, 12) is therefore sharpened in civil conflict: where contentious politics fragments authority among rival power centers (Tilly and Tarrow Reference Tilly and Tarrow2015), responses arrive simultaneously and contradictorily — a configuration that consolidated polities rarely present.

Second, even when scholarship acknowledges that constraints travel through networks beyond formal state censors (Street Reference Street2012), civil conflicts foreground an additional enforcement modality that sits between censorship and public disorder: informal acoustic policing that compels sonic compliance through threats, assault, humiliation, or retaliation, under selective non-intervention and credible impunity. Acoustic coercion names this extra-legal enforcement of sonic conformity without the need for a written ban.

Third, music-and-nationalism research often privileges composers, texts, and audiences while under-theorizing performers; working musicians whose labor places them directly in the crossfire of competing demands. Street (Reference Street2012) rightly foregrounds musicians as political actors, but this can presume voluntarism. In polarized conflicts, performers may have limited choice: livelihoods depend on meeting immediate demands imposed by whoever controls the local acoustic space, making “neutrality” difficult to sustain in practice.

This research note addresses these gaps through two interventions, one conceptual and one methodological. Conceptually, it introduces acoustic coercion as a distinct mechanism of enforcement that existing frameworks only partially capture: propaganda and censorship name state instruments, resistance names oppositional practice; the extra-legal middle ground — violent enforcement under official acquiescence — falls between. Methodologically, it demonstrates how historical acoustemology — reconstructing past sonic environments through textual traces — can serve nationalism studies. The National Schism (Ethnikos Dichasmos, 1915–1922) split Greece between followers of Prime Minister Eleftherios Venizelos and of King Constantine I — initially over entry into the First World War — producing rival governments and successive purges. I treat it as a nationalism-studies case because it nationalized political allegiance — casting factional alignment as a claim to represent the nation — and thus turned everyday audibility into a practical arena of boundary enforcement. The boundary was political rather than ethnonational, but the boundary-work — classification, policing, sanction (Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002; Wimmer Reference Wimmer2013) — was identical in kind, rendering the case portable.

Conceptual Intervention: Acoustic Coercion

Acoustic coercion refers to the informal enforcement of a desired sonic order through threats, intimidation, or violence directed at performers or audiences. It occurs when non-state actors (such as partisan groups, vigilantes, or mobilized crowds) compel the performance of approved music or the cessation of disfavored sounds. Crucially, acoustic coercion requires credible impunity or tacit state complicity: authorities may publicly claim free expression while privately allowing or even encouraging vigilante suppression.

Acoustic coercion is not simply “sonic violence” (the aggressive use of sound as a weapon); rather, it is interpersonal violence aimed at controlling sound content. The concept consolidates what several literatures document piecemeal. Stoever’s (Reference Stoever2016) sonic color line is a normative sonic code often policed by non-state actors under tacit state sanction; Cardoso (Reference Cardoso2019) traces sound-politics through São Paulo’s regulatory apparatus; Pérez Castillo (Reference Pérez Castillo, Zalduondo and Iglesias2021) examines its formal, carceral pole. Where the sonic color line names a durable racialized code, acoustic coercion names the enforcement event itself — extra-legal violence contingent on sonic output, rationalized by credible impunity — agnostic about the boundary policed.

Millar’s (Reference Millar2020, Reference Millar2022) research on Northern Ireland demonstrates how sectarian songs create “a sociocultural apparatus that helped legitimise [paramilitary groups’] position within the community,” documenting how “cultural violence” through song “facilitates recruitment” and “obstructs political accommodation” (Millar Reference Millar2022, 12). Orange parades through Catholic neighborhoods illustrate enforcement by non-state actors with tacit state backing (Jarman Reference Jarman1997). Gillespie’s (Reference Gillespie2025, 152, 155) “nationalist soundscapes” describe far-right groups deploying “sonic violence” to create “affective atmospheres” that displace racialized others through sound’s vibrational force — what Goodman (Reference Goodman2010, 83) terms a “politics of frequency.”

Acoustic coercion differs in four respects from this sonic-violence paradigm (Goodman Reference Goodman2010; Gillespie Reference Gillespie2025). Mechanism: there, acoustic output is itself the weapon — vibrational force acting on bodies; here, sound is the trigger and the violence extra-sonic — harm arrives because of sound, not by it. Agency: identifiable human enforcers making targeted decisions, not technological mediation such as massed amplification. Temporality: prospective — anticipated retaliation disciplines conduct before any blow falls — rather than immediate auditory impact. Target: selective, against those producing politically unacceptable sounds, not bodies indiscriminately within a saturated space. Gillespie’s sonic violence and acoustic coercion are thus complementary dimensions of sound’s nationalist politics.

Acoustic coercion is directional but not unidirectional: it operates from those with local power against those without, though “local power” shifts with territorial control. In Athens, Venizelists prosecuted royalist singing through military courts (formal censorship) before November 1920; Antivenizelists enforced conformity through mob violence (acoustic coercion) after (Kokoris Reference Kokoris2025). The distinction lies in enforcement mechanism, not which faction dominates nationally.

Violence emerges when three conditions coincide: (1) acoustic space becomes saturated with political meaning, eliminating neutral options; (2) enforcers perceive sounds as territorial claims requiring response; and (3) authorities signal through inaction that enforcement will not be punished.

Two scope conditions follow. First, the mechanism is not exclusive to civil conflict, but civil conflict renders it maximally legible: rival repertoires are mutually intelligible, so any audible choice — including abstention — registers as a position. Unfamiliar or “foreign” music can be policed much as minority languages are — the offense being audible difference itself — yet the mechanism travels intact. Second, the impossibility of neutrality is empirical, not legal: no statute conscripts the musician, but in a saturated field abstention itself signifies — the silent laterna still “speaks” — and working performers become involuntary participants by continuing their trade.

Methodological Intervention: Historical Acoustemology

How can scholars study past sonic environments when no audio recordings survive? Mansell’s (Reference Mansell2021) framework of “historical acoustemology” provides a solution. Building on Feld’s (Reference Feld, Feld and Basso1996) concept of acoustemology — sound as a way of knowing and being in the world — Mansell argues that historians can reconstruct past sonic environments through textual sources. This approach treats newspapers, diaries, and chronicles as “earwitness testimony.”

Two terminological cautions are in order. I avoid “soundscape” in my own analytical voice — the term carries acoustic ecology’s ideological inheritance and has traveled beyond conceptual control (Kelman Reference Kelman2010) — retaining it only within others’ quoted concepts. “Acoustemology,” coined by Feld for relatively settled systems of sonic knowing, requires similar care: acoustic coercion describes precisely the scrambling of such knowledge, so I retain Mansell’s label for the method while stressing that its object here is contestation, not acoustemic stability. Nor is the toolkit confined to the past: it is equally available to ethnographic inquiry; the historical emphasis reflects this case’s evidence — no recordings survive — not the concept.

However, critical sound studies scholarship cautions against unreflective reconstruction that assumes the historian can transparently “listen through the ears” of past hearers. Robinson (Reference Robinson2020, 11) develops the concept of “critical listening positionality”: awareness of how “the ‘filters of race, class, gender and ability’ frame how we listen.” Stoever (Reference Stoever2016, 7–16) demonstrates how “the listening ear” produces racialized sonic categories. Veeraraghavan (Reference Veeraraghavan2024) extends this to the institutional regulation of audibility: what an authority registers as having been “heard” can itself be gerrymandered.

These critiques require acknowledging that historical reconstruction of sonic environments is always partial and positioned. The partisan press that serves as the primary source base for this study represented certain listening subjects — urban, literate, politically engaged — while obscuring others. The voices of performers themselves, particularly lower-class itinerant musicians, are mediated through elite chroniclers who may have misheard, misrepresented, or simply ignored what did not align with their political interests.

This study draws on systematic research in four Athenian newspapers from November–December 1920: two Venizelist (Patris, Estia) and two Antivenizelist (Athinai, Politeia). These major partisan dailies were selected for: (1) continuous publication through the November 1920 electoral reversal — the November 1, 1920 election, in which Venizelos’s Liberals were unexpectedly defeated by the royalist United Opposition, opening the way to Constantine’s restoration; (2) explicit partisan alignment enabling triangulation; and (3) documented attention to cultural and street life, including music. Partisan alignment is coded for this period based on editorial line and consistent factional positioning (rather than the paper’s long-run reputation). Dates follow the Julian (Old Style) calendar then in civil use in Greece, thirteen days behind the Gregorian.

The research examined approximately 120 issues (30 per newspaper across two months), identifying 23 distinct incidents involving musical performance, coercion, or negotiation (corpus documented in Kokoris Reference Kokoris2024) — of which six are analyzed in detail here (see Table 1). Supplementary sources include Mavrogordatos’s (Reference Mavrogordatos2015) comprehensive political history of the Schism and Gounaris and Christopoulos’s (Reference Gounaris and Christopoulos2019, abstract) analysis of its ideological parameters, which demonstrates that the Schism should be understood as “an act in the broader and much older Greek ideological drama, that of the tantalising and incomplete ‘return’ to the East via the European West.”

Table 1.

Documented Incidents of Acoustic Conflict, Athens, November–December 1920

Table 1. Long description

The table consists of six columns: Date, Location, Actors, Incident Type, Source, and Outcome.

* Row 1: Oct 31. Kolonaki Sq. Laterna player and enforcers. Beaten for lacking anthem. Source: Politeia. Outcome: Physical assault.

* Row 2: Nov 22. Tavern (unspecified). Patrons and Venizelist guest. Negotiated truce fails. Source: Athinai. Outcome: Social exclusion.

* Row 3: Nov 27. Lykourgou St. restaurant. Lt. Konstantellos, organ player, and patrons. Song request triggers assault. Source: Patris. Outcome: Arrest and humiliation.

* Row 4: Nov 30. City center. Laterna player. Cannot play old repertoire. Source: Athinai. Outcome: Economic precarity.

* Row 5: Dec 19. Themistocleous St. 2 policemen and 1 civilian. Beaten for singing. Source: Patris. Outcome: Severe injury.

* Row 6: Dec 19. Wine shop, Neapolis. Citizens. Beaten for singing. Source: Estia. Outcome: Severe injury.

Incidents were selected based on: (1) sufficient detail to establish actors, location, repertoire, and consequences; (2) corroboration across rival publications or internal consistency within satirical versus reportorial genres; and (3) relevance to the analytical concepts (acoustic coercion, triple valence, performer precarity). Incidents involving purely verbal political disputes without musical dimensions were excluded. All translations from Greek are by the author, cross-checked against published translations where available (particularly Kokoris Reference Kokoris2025). Greek terms and titles are transliterated using a conventional romanization (based broadly on the Library of Congress system, without diacritics). Historical acoustemology is thus interpretive reconstruction shaped by the researcher’s positionality: newspapers are treated as earwitness testimony, read across partisan lines, weighted by genre (satire, editorial, police blotter), and interrogated for what they omit.

Limitations: The source base reflects an urban, Athens-centered perspective; rural sound worlds and provincial dynamics remain largely invisible. Newspaper survival biases toward published rather than suppressed accounts. Gender dynamics are underexplored: documented incidents involve exclusively male performers and enforcers, reflecting both the gendered structure of public musical labor and possible reporting biases. The archive itself reflects power relations that shaped what was documented and how.

This intervention speaks directly to core concerns of nationalism studies: how boundaries of belonging are enacted and defended in public space, and how informal sovereignty is exercised when authority is fragmented or selectively applied. By treating sound as a site where belonging is demanded, tested, and enforced, the note links micro-level encounters to macro-level processes of polarization and conflict escalation.

Demonstration: Musicians in the Crossfire of the Greek National Schism

The Schism divided Greek society into two hostile camps and — central to nationalism studies — nationalized political allegiance into a struggle over legitimate sovereignty and the nation’s destiny. Public sound thus became a practical test of belonging: songs and requests could be heard as claims about who represented “the nation,” and sanctioned accordingly. The conflict was not merely political but, as Mavrogordatos (Reference Mavrogordatos2015) demonstrates, acquired the intensity, absolutism, and symbolic density of deeply polarized societies. Gounaris and Christopoulos (Reference Gounaris and Christopoulos2019) demonstrate that the Schism drew on deeper currents of Greek identity, selecting from debates about Greece’s relationship to European modernity “whatever arguments were necessary to invest military and political choices with a ‘deeper’ meaning.” The following Athens cases trace how this translated into performer vulnerability and informal sonic enforcement.

Each faction developed distinct symbols, rituals, and sacred music. The Venizelist anthem O Yios tou Psiloriti (referencing Psiloritis mountain, in Venizelos’s native Crete) and the royalist O Aetos (The Eagle, symbol of the Byzantine-inflected monarchy) were quasi-liturgical expressions of competing national visions. The electoral reversal dramatically inverted the politics of public sound. Royalist crowds filled the streets with O Aetos, while Venizelist musical expression faced suppression — crucially, through informal violence rather than formal prohibition (Kokoris Reference Kokoris2025).

Acoustic Coercion: The Gap Between Tolerance and Terror

Acoustic coercion operated bidirectionally, shifting with political power. Just one day before the November elections, the Antivenizelist newspaper Politeia (October 31, 1920) reported that “Venizelist henchmen beat up an organist because his laterna did not have the ‘Son of Psiloritis’” (Politeia 1920). The electoral reversal inverted who enforced and who suffered. The Venizelist newspaper Estia reported later, on December 19, 1920:

Formal tolerance — “The Government does not forbid any song” — coexisted with informal terror so severe that victims may not have “recovered their speech.”

Further documentation from Patris (December 18, 1920) reported that, during the previous day, two policemen and a civilian were beaten for singing the Venizelist anthem on Themistocleous Street: “their faces are swollen, there is fear that their vision will be affected, and one is coughing up blood” (Patris 1920b). The severity of these injuries demonstrates that acoustic coercion was embodied violence with lasting physical consequences.

The Estia newspaper observed that the new government “does not resort to violent measures” formally but “establishes the tyranny of the unknown and the irresponsible” through its tacit permission of vigilante enforcement (Estia 1920). This phrase describes acoustic coercion’s distinctive character: violence without accountability, enforcement without formal authorization, terror that leaves no legal trace but shapes behavior through anticipated consequences.

The Trapped Performer: Technology and Precarity

A satirical account in Athinai (November 30, 1920) captured the impossible position of itinerant barrel organ players — musicians whose instruments contained pre-recorded cylinders of fixed repertoire:

The laterna player’s predicament illustrates the performer’s precarity. His professional investment — the cylinder containing the second Venizelist anthem, “Venizelos” (Kalomoiris-Doxas 1917) — became a liability overnight when political power shifted: “the song of the Father of the Race” is the player’s epithet for it, echoing the anthem’s text hailing Venizelos as father of the race (Kokoris Reference Kokoris2024) — a repertoire prized under the fallen government was precisely what he could not play to the royalist street. Unlike a guitarist who could learn new songs, the barrel organ’s technology locked its repertoire in place. Unable to afford new equipment encoding the politically “correct” sounds, he was reduced to begging for the means to purchase political acceptability.

His hoarse voice substituting for the forbidden cylinder dramatizes how musicians became what one chronicler called “instruments of the victor” (Athanatos Reference Athanatos1920), both literal instruments and metaphorical tools conscripted into political service. This musician’s livelihood depended on producing sounds over which he had no control.

The Musician as Enforcer

If the silent laterna player illustrates the performer as victim, another incident reveals performers as agents of acoustic coercion. Patris (November 27, 1920) reported that Lieutenant I. Konstantellos, dining at a restaurant on Lykourgou Street, offered a coin to an organ player who had just performed “The Eagle” and requested “The Son of Psiloritis.” The organ player responded with insults; when the officer slapped him, patrons attacked Konstantellos savagely. Police and a military patrol extracted him, then detained him without inquiry while releasing the organ player. Konstantellos was forced to remove his uniform and wear a tram conductor’s clothes during his public march to the garrison (Patris 1920a).

This incident inverts the “trapped performer” dynamic: the musician, empowered by the political shift, becomes enforcer rather than victim. The ritualized humiliation — stripping of military insignia, forced costume change — transformed acoustic coercion into spectacular public theater.

Counter-Example: Negotiated Acoustic Space and Its Fragility

The documented incidents represent moments when negotiation failed. A scene from Athinai reveals that compromise was attempted:

The attempted compromise — neither faction’s anthem — was an explicit negotiation of sonic rules. But “Gero-Dimos,” an ostensibly neutral folk song about a brigand’s life, was immediately read through a political lens. The reference to “forty years of thieving” resonated with Antivenizelist perceptions of Venizelist governance as exploitative, its language playing on the double meaning of kleftiko as both “brigands’ song” and “thievery.”

The saturation of acoustic space with political meaning rendered neutral ground impossible to occupy. This case demonstrates both the possibility and fragility of negotiated acoustic space. Is this boundary maintenance or boundary manifestation? Both: the genre’s coding preceded the encounter — the boundary produced “Gero-Dimos’s” meaning — while the patrons’ enforcement reproduced and hardened the boundary in turn. Boundaries persist insofar as they are performed (Lamont and Molnár Reference Lamont and Molnár2002; Wimmer Reference Wimmer2013), and sound is among the practices that make them audible and consequential.

Comparative Implications

Acoustic coercion provides a portable lens for comparing how nationalist and ethnopolitical boundaries are enforced through everyday audibility. The comparison is mechanism-focused: when does a sonic act become a trigger for coercion, who enforces compliance, and under what conditions do authorities intervene, ignore, or tacitly enable enforcement? This shifts attention from “whether censorship exists” to how sonic conformity is produced — often without written prohibitions — through credible expectations of impunity.

Comparative work is likely to be most revealing in contexts marked by contested authority and rapid political reordering: electoral turnovers, revolutionary interludes, polarized borderlands. The key is to operationalize cross-case variables that travel: (1) the sonic trigger, (2) actor configuration, (3) coercive repertoire, (4) authority response, and (5) behavioral effects. Framed this way, acoustic coercion becomes not a claim about one national history, but a comparative tool for tracking informal sovereignty and boundary enforcement as they are enacted — audibly — in public space.

Implications for Nationalism Studies

This note contributes to nationalism studies in three ways. First, it highlights an under-specified mechanism of boundary enforcement: not only the symbolic work of national music, but the policing of who may sound “legitimately” in public. Acoustic coercion captures how “wrong” repertoire, language, or refusal to perform can be treated as actionable disloyalty.

Second, it refines how we think about state power in ethnopolitical contention. Rather than treating the state as either fully sovereign or absent, acoustic coercion directs attention to selective enforcement and uneven protection: the point at which rights exist on paper while predictable non-intervention produces practical vulnerability.

Third, it recenters performers as a distinct position in nationalist conflict. Composers and audiences often retain discretion (what to write, where to attend), but working musicians confront immediate demands imposed by whoever controls the local acoustic space. A performer-centered lens thus shows how polarization distributes risk through cultural labor: the same embodied skills that enable collective celebration can become liabilities when power shifts. Methodologically, historical acoustemology offers a practical route for recovering these dynamics from archival traces while remaining explicit about evidentiary limits — in past cases and, with the same equipment, in present ones.