Music

X was questioned in a small room furnished with a table and two chairs. When his answers failed to satisfy, the table and chairs would be removed, a strobe light and a music player would be moved in, and he would be shackled to an iron ring in the floor in a stress position. The position imposed on him required him to squat, with his weight on the tips of his toes, his arms beneath and behind his knees, and his wrists short-shackled to the floor behind his ankles so that he could not fall backward or to the side for relief, or get his weight back off his toes. Once X was in place, the room's lights were turned out and the music-almost always hard rock or metal--would be turned on. His interrogators would leave him alone like that for intervals that ranged from about five minutes to, he thinks, three days-alone except for the sound, the lights, and, if he were left there for a long time, the muscle cramps in his legs and the back pain that one would expect such a position to produce. In a videotaped interview after his release that circulated for a while on the internet, X explained that the main effect of the music was to prevent him from focusing his mind away from the physical pain, making that pain more vivid. X said of his inability to distract himself with his own thoughts, "It makes you feel like you're going mad." When a session was over, and he was returned to his call, X would fall asleep, exhausted." 1

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega's surrender, the use of "acoustic bombardment" has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law.

TOWARD 21 ST-CENTURY MUSIC HISTORIES My title alludes to two insights I had in the last decades of the 20 th century about the nature of tertiary music history instruction in the United States. In the late 1970s, when I was first teaching such courses, it came to me that music history (and, indeed, all canon-based study in the humanities) could be understood as a highly stylized form of ancestor worship, a form in which (unlike in real life) we get to choose our ancestors, and in which we teachers choose both to what ancestors we would introduce our students and on which of those ancestors' stories or musical utterances we would confer mythic status. Years later, as I prepared to teach a course called "Music in the (American) 20 th Century" in the first year of the 21 st century, it was suddenly obvious to me that we teachers of music history, as de facto priests of this form of ancestor worship, really taught 'the ancestors' by teaching the young how to listen to them, largely through the then-unacknowledged mediation of recording technologies. Someday, I thought in the fall of 2000, I would write a book developing these insights, examining the premises and choices that "listening to the dead" implied, and suggesting ways that we might, in the United States, rethink how we taught the stuff we teach in music history: repertoires; musical cultures with long written histories and oral traditions; any given musicality's inevitable imbrication with the technologies, cultural and philosophical/religious beliefs and practices, and politics of the human world that produced it. This was to be, in my mind, a short book, grounded in my long, journeyman experience in the classrooms, then, of eight very different institutions. Ha! Quite apart from the reckless ambition of that project, any number of unexpected changes would soon render it unrealizable, not least: 9/11 and the resurgence of both an egregious form of "Yanqui" imperialism and a growing epidemic of Western Islamophobia; the swift expansion of digital technologies, especially search engines, wikis, streaming everything available all the time to those with access to wealth or wealthy institutions; and the indisputable fact that neither my country's elites nor its youth have very much use for history of any kind, much less any history of music that predates music's nearly total transformation into a commodity, and genre of YouTube communication. And yet, I think, listening to our dead-whoever they might be-could yet be a way to resist the relentless commodifications and violences of our time. I mean the phrase "listening to the dead" to be an attending to the dead, a heeding of them, a way of taking seriously the traces that they left behind of their own desperate but nonetheless expressive lives. This is something one

Resumen Uno de los aspectos más sorprendentes de la cultura musical de posguerra de los Estados Unidos es el uso sistemático de la música como arma de guerra. Esto surgió a la luz pública por primera vez en 1989 cuando las tropas de los Estados Unidos utilizaron ...

This paper assumes as a premise that music histories, like all histories, result from a conscious choosing of one’s cultural ancestors. By asking who ‘the ancestors’ would logically be for musicians active in the contemporary United States, it implies the connections between institutional music histories and the ideological formation of local or national identities, and acknowledges the increasing difficulty of managing those connections in an era of widespread migration and the oft-proclaimed decline of nation-states in favor of globalizing entities. Determinedly recommending neither universal or global adjustments to music historical pedagogy, it asserts profound structural changes in music history curricula as inevitable, names the network of economic and ideological interests against which curricular reformers struggle, and reaffirms the relevance of music history as a way to learn from the dead how it could be to be human.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text and to make commercial use of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

One of the most startling aspects of musical culture in the post-Cold War United States is the systematic use of music as a weapon of war. First coming to mainstream attention in 1989, when US troops blared loud music in an effort to induce Panamanian president Manuel Norriega's surrender, the use of "acoustic bombardment" has become standard practice on the battlefields of Iraq, and specifically musical bombardment has joined sensory deprivation and sexual humiliation as among the non-lethal means by which prisoners from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo may be coerced to yield their secrets without violating US law. The very idea that music could be an instrument of torture confronts us with a novel-and disturbing-perspective on contemporary musicality in the United States. What is it that we in the United States might know about ourselves by contemplating this perspective? What does our government's use of music in the "war on terror" tell us (and our antagonists) about ourselves? This paper is a first attempt to understand the military and cultural logics on which the contemporary use of music as a weapon in torture and war is based. After briefly tracing the development of acoustic weapons in the late 20th century, and their deployment at the second battle of Falluja in November, 2004, I summarize what can be known about the theory and practice of using music to torture detainees in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo. I contemplate some aspects of late 20th-century musical culture in the civilian US that resonate with the US security community's conception of music as a weapon, and survey the way musical torture is discussed in the virtual world known as the blogosphere. Finally, I sketch some questions for further research and analysis. Exordium This paper reports on the earliest stages of a project that began not in my musicological work but in a moment of my real life. In spring, 2003, I was reading Nuha al-Radi's Baghdad Diaries, an account of her life before, during and after the first Gulf War. I read After the war ended, the Allies spent all day and all night flying over our heads, breaking the sound barrier. Just like Panama when they blasted Noriega, holed up in the Vatican Embassy with music. For fifteen days, Bush deafened the poor ambassador and Noriega with hard rock. Our torture went on for months-20 or 30 times, day or night... (al-Radi 1998: 58) TRANS-Revista Transcultural de Música-Transcultural Musi... http://www.sibetrans.com/trans/a152/music-as-torture-music-as...

Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that "loud music" has been used in the detention camps of the United States' "global war on terror." A survey of practices