Oh, What a Musical War! A Retrospective after the First World War Centenary

As Emma Hanna notes in the opening line of Sounds of War, ‘In parallel with studies of the poetry of the Great War, Britain’s musical history of the conflict has focused on a small group of elite composers’ (p. 1). Indeed, musical interest in the war has tended to focus on the likes of Edward Elgar, Ralph Vaughan Williams and George Butterworth just as literary enquiry has traditionally centred on Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon and Robert Graves. However, as William Brooks, Christina Bashford and Gayle Magee write, ‘There are many stories that could be told [about the war], and the vast bulk of them concern ordinary people, not statesmen or generals or celebrated composers. To understand the war, surely, we need do no more than to give these voices a hearing.’1