Year: 2010
Type: article
Abstract: Musical practices permeate the experiences of American troops fighting in the current Iraq war.Music serves many overlapping and sometimes contradictory roles in troops' day-to-day lives, such as providing ways to pass the time, socialize, relax, escape, motivate, process, mourn, remember, forget, and to express a wide range of emotions: pride, fear, joy, boredom, loss, anger.Similar to editors Susan Crafts, Daniel Cavicchi, and Charles Keil of My Music, I consider "musical practices" as all the ways that people engage with music, from playing, recording, and listening, to rejecting it.1 In the volume's introduction, George Lipsitz writes: Musical practices do not 'start' when we pick up an instrument or when we pay attention to what is happening in a given song.We enter a world of music already in progress around us.No less than in Africa, we encounter music everywhere-at the schools and the symphony halls, in the churches and the taverns, on the radio and television.Our musical practices do not blend life and art as thoroughly as they do in some parts of Africa, but they nonetheless function as nodes in a larger network, as complicated and diverse as ways for people to reaffirm old identities and to forge new ones.2 Christopher Small offers the term "musicking" to emphasize that "music is not primarily a thing or a collection of things, but an activity in which we engage."He defines the word to include performance, composition, listening, and dancing.3 This article is about musicking, specifically, the practice of listening to music.Some members of the American military compose and perform music while deployed to Iraq; almost all listen to music and listen to music a lot, suggesting that this daily engagement with music is an important part of troops' experiences of war.New technological developments enable American troops to listen to music throughout days and nights during both leisure and work time activities, allowing for the ongoing blending of life and art, or as Eric, a white Army medic in his late 20s whom I interviewed on February 26, 2007, put it, "music was huge over there!"Examining troops' musical practice of listening sheds light on the complicated and diverse "ways for people to reaffirm old identities and forge new ones" within the especially demanding context of war. 4 Identity is an interesting issue in the armed forces because so much emphasis is placed by both those in the upper echelons and those in lower ranks on shared identity.By "identity," I refer to both the ways This research has been partially funded by the University of Oregon's Office of Research.I owe my gratitude to my colleagues Jonathan Pieslak, Martin Daughtry, and Suzanne Cusick for their compelling explorations of the soundscapes of the Iraq war.Special thanks to Jonathan
Source: Music and Politics
Author: Lisa Gilman
Institution: Wesleyan University
Language: English
Topic: Music History and Culture
Subfield: Music
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Funder: University of Oregon
OpenAlex ID: W1996788375