‘The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War

IF 0.2 3区 艺术学 0 MUSIC
Erin Johnson-Williams
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引用次数: 0

Abstract

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.
“手风琴在战壕中的致命工作”:南非战争中痛苦的音景
1900年初,几家英国报纸以“协奏曲在战壕中的致命工作”为标题报道称,在对马费金的围攻中,英国军队的手风琴演奏者只是通过演奏手风琴的曲调来分散敌方士兵的注意力,以此来抓捕敌方士兵《音乐新闻》的一位评论员指出,人们很遗憾地得知,音乐艺术应该被用来引诱人们走向毁灭,但后来,它被合理化了,“战争中一切都是公平的”。在南非战争期间,手风琴的这种混合使用被进一步用作身体本身腐烂的隐喻:正如伊丽莎白·范·海宁根所指出的,布尔集中营的食物非常少得可怜,以至于给囚犯吃的肉曾经被描述为来自“一个看起来像被风吹倒的手风琴的尸体”。同样,Krebs(1999)讨论了战壕中手风琴的存在,作为同时代关于布尔士兵对音乐的易感性的刻板印象的一个例子,与他们认为自己落后且容易被操纵的观念有关。根据对南非战争期间集中营中音乐的引用,特别是无处不在的、拟人化的手风琴,本文将在创伤研究的框架内,对20世纪初英国军事音乐的使用进行定位,提出帝国战争的音景隐含着身体痛苦的痕迹。
本文章由计算机程序翻译,如有差异,请以英文原文为准。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.30
自引率
66.70%
发文量
58
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