M. J.

Grant

Chaos and Order: Issues in the Historiography of Martial Music

Among the countless copperplates that await visitors to the Austrian Museum of Military History in
Vienna, one of the first is a depiction, by Matthäus Merian the Elder, of the Battle of Lützen (1632)
during what became known as the Thirty Years War.1 In principle, this copperplate shares many
elements with the other examples of this genre on display in the Museum; in practice, however, the
composition of this particular engraving sets it apart even from others by the same artist, and makes
it one of the most strikingly truthful depictions of battle I have seen. (Truthful rather than factual:
one of the great advantages of artistic communication is its ability to use the unreal to uncover and
convey the real).

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What, then, is the truth that this copperplate reveals? Two things immediately strike the viewer. On

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the one hand, the sense of meticulous order conveyed by the depiction of many individual units of
soldiers, formed so neatly into their Roman-style battle squares; the effect is heightened by the fact
that in many cases, we see only the straight-line contours formed by the raised pikes of the soldiers,

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who as individuals and as humans disappear into the square’s. There is nothing unusual in all these
squares, which were not only a military reality but also conform so well (too well, we might suggest)
to the aesthetics of the seventeenth century, to the cartographic sense of order and the Newtonian
concern with accuracy and rule elsewhere demonstrated in the numerous treatises and illustrations
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on ballistics, along with the instruments used to make such calculations on the battlefield itself,
examples of which are also on display in the Museum.2 What makes this particular copperplate
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unusual, and probably inaccurate in terms of how the battlefield was actually organised, is how
closely packed together the squares are.
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The other thing that immediately strikes us, however, is the very opposite of order: the explosion.
Foregrounded, just to the right of centre, we witness the very moment when a munitions wagon
explodes. We see the force of the impact on the objects caught therein: a wheel and other elements,
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ripped apart and thrown up by the blast. It is the seventeenth-century equivalent of those videos
that now flood social media after terrorist attacks: see the exact moment when a suicide bomber blows himself
up; see the exact moment when a powder keg explodes in the heat of battle. Illuminated just to the
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front of this explosion, we see something else: gallows, from which hang two corpses. This presence
of the gallows at the very front of the battlescene is another of the more unusual elements of this
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copperplate: although there are many contemporary depictions of military tribunals and executions,
these tend to be separate to the depictions of battle. By placing the gallows here, in a prominent
position, death is presented in a manner altogether more allegorical that the mere depiction of the
fallen of the battle itself. And it is this sense of the allegorical, the use of certain elements and their
composition relative to one another to draw out meanings not apparent from a merely “realistic”
portrayal, that sets this copperplate apart from so many others. The explosion is the very opposite of

1
Matthäus Merian the Elder, Die Schlacht von Lützen vom 6. November 1632, published in Theatrum Europanaeum
II; digital version available at http://www.dhm.de/datenbank/img.php?img=gr102105&format=1; a larger-
scale, zoomable version is available at
http://daten.digitale-sammlungen.de/~db/0009/bsb00099512/images/index.html?
id=00099512&ampgroesser=&fip=qrsxseayasdasfsdrwsdasxdsydsdaseaya&no=2&seite=1.
2
The new science of ballistics was, at that point less than a hundred years old, its beginnings normally traced
to Nicolò Tartaglia’s 1537 work Nova scientia. For information on this work and a link to a new open access
edition with English translation, see https://www.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/en/news/features/features-
feature29, accessed 11 July 2016.
the exactly defined squares: sudden, uncontrolled, tearing things apart rather than bringing them
together into a utilitarian and cohesive whole. And on second glance, we see that this stark contrast
of chaos and order goes to the heart of the copperplate as a whole. For not only in the distant top
part of the picture, but interspersed with the squares themselves, we see the corpses of horses, and
of men; we see both horses and men running wild in all directions. Again, nothing unusual or
surprising about this in a battle scene: this, however, is where the exact composition of the
copperplate becomes so important. As mentioned, Merian packs the squares together much more
tightly than in other contemporary battlescenes — the difference is even more palpable if we
compare this copperplate directly with Peeter Snayer’s much larger painting of the same battle,
displayed right next to it in the Museum. And precisely because of this composition of the elements,
Merian manages to convey quite brilliantly something very significant indeed. He conveys the exact
moment when, to quote Yeats, things fall apart. He captures that split second when the training and
the preparation and the apparently impermeable corpus of the square gives way in the instant of

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violent encounter itself, when precision gives way to panic, order to chaos. The message is reinforced
at several points in the engraving: where the edges of the squares are not visibly dissipating into

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death and panic, they are obscured by the smoke of cannons — smoke, too, no rarity in such
depictions, but as closely packed as this picture is, the impression created is of a thick fog obscuring
whole swathes of the battlefield, making even the representation of the battle impossible. (In a way,

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the smoke also stands in for the mist which, according to many accounts, covered the battlefield
many times that day). Truth itself, then, the possibility of knowing what is happening, how things
are, is made as impossible for the viewer as for the soldier. As well, the smoke stands for an obscurity
which is to be feared; like the explosion which creates the smoke, it is the confrontation of the
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rational and the controllable with the unknowable and dangerous.
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Why this long discourse on a copperplate, when the subject of this essay is not art, but music? The
answer is simple: we cannot understand the history of military and martial music without first
coming to a deep understanding of war itself — not just the history and development of warfare,
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but warfare’s very nature. And what this engraving conveys so directly and so succinctly is the
essential contradiction at the heart of all warfare: that war is order and chaos; that military training
and strategy is an attempt to impose order on chaos, to make predictable and manageable the most
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extreme emotional experience there is — looking death in the face, either as its victim or its
manservant; and that for all our attempts to bring it to order, this is a battle which chaos always,
always wins.
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Military musicians are not absent from Merian’s depiction. Exactly in the lower right-hand corner
of the copperplate, we see two mounted trumpeters, their instruments bedecked with banners. They
are playing from the vantage point of a hill, a position which musicians very frequently inhabit in
illustrations of battle in this period, and which was probably drawn from actual practice. It makes
strategic sense to place musicians in a position of relative safety, close to those who would give them
commands and who for this purpose need a clear view of proceedings. The position also meant the
musicians could be easily located and seen, even where the battle’s noise threatens to drown out
their playing. Snayer’s painting of the same battle presents us with many more musicians, in small
groups: four mounted trumpeters gathered around a mounted kettle-drummer, in a stationary
position, near the painting’s left-hand side; mounted trumpeters leading their units into the fray.

Artistic positioning of the musicians in Merian’s engraving and others like it also reflects pictorial
conventions and traditions: a way of framing the picture just as, in so many examples over several
centuries, we find trumpets or drums, along with other symbolic paraphernalia of war, such as flags
and guns, in the actual frames of paintings, murals, portraits and so on. In landscape paintings and
drawings of the time, the foreground is often designed as an elevation, exactly the position from
which many of the musicians would have played. But the number of other examples, which as well
as portraits of military leaders include interiors of inns and houses where soldiers are at rest, or
pictures of camp, or of military processions, suggest that there is more to this convention than a
faithful depiction of the order of things on the battlefield.3 There are important exceptions to the
general rule, especially paintings which show wounded or killed drummers, often foregrounded in
the centre with their drums. But the use of music and musicians as, effectively, a frame for the
picture as a whole is by far the more common strategy, not least because it cuts across genres. It
stresses the symbolic and not just practical significance of the military instruments of war.

In this essay, I will argue that the idea of music as a frame for action is more than mere artistic
convention, and potentially revealing if we want to unpick the meanings of music in battle,
meanings that go far beyond either signalling or otherwise coordinating troops, and also far beyond
the noise that the music makes in this context. Recent work both in the musicology of war and in

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the study of collective violence will be used to elaborate these points. In the first section, I will argue
that the point of battlefield music is to provide order on the battlefield, and that this runs counter to

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many long-standing but largely untested ideas about the function of musical practices during
combat. In the second section, I will use Charles Tilly’s typology of collective violence to argue for a
reading of many martial practices, and especially musical practices, as elements of what Tilly called

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violent rituals. In this way, I will suggest that the demise of music on the battlefield is related to more
fundamental changes in the way wars are fought, and that a historiography of martial musical
practices could thus prove significant for the historiography of warfare as a whole.
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When, with reference to Merian, I talk about the disintegration of order into chaos on the
battlefield, I am primarily referring to the microlevel of individual combatants’ actions, reactions
and interactions. Microanalysis of violent encounters constitutes one of the most significant trends
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in recent studies of armed conflict and violence. Such research variously takes the form of
sociological microanalysis of violent interactions (Collins 2008, Klusemann 2010) or analyses of the
lived experience of combatants and combat’s often long-term effects upon them (Holmes 1985,
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Bourke 1999, Grossmann 2009 amongst others). In the case of military history these studies
presents a major challenge to more traditional, macro-level approaches which focus on commanders
rather than foot soldiers, the movement of armies rather than the combat experiences of
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individuals. Pictorial depictions of battles such as that by Merian fall into what John Keegan, one of
the pioneers of microanalytical studies of warfare, calls “the ‘outcome’ approach to military
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history”, where the main point of the historian’s narrative is to retrace “how [commanders]
manoeuvre their men around the constricted area of a battlefield, in the race against time in which
the limits of daylight, of human resilience, and of available material will measure them
out” (Keegan 1978, p. 45). The problem with this, Keegan argued in his now classic counter-
narrative, is that the commander’s view of things is very different from that of the soldier on the
ground:

3
A much later, quite different but no less interesting example of music as visual frame can be seen in fabric
square “instruction manuals” for infantry soldiers in the Austro-Hungarian army in the late nineteenth
century, examples of which are also on display in the Museum in Vienna. The centre of these squares
includes written and diagrammatic information on such matters as ballistics and weapons; the very centre
shows various medals around the crest of the imperial infantry. Three edges of the square are given over to
notated music, the left- and right-hand sides show the various bugle signals, the top edge the music and lyrics
of the Kaiserhymne. The bottom edge gives further written information on ballistics. There are German- and
Hungarian-language versions.
 The soldier is vouch-safed no such well-ordered and clear-cut vision. Battle, for him, takes no
place in a wildly unstable physical and emotional environment; he may spend much of his
time in combat as a mildly apprehensive spectator, granted, by some freak of events, a
comparatively danger-free grandstand view of others fighting; then he may suddenly be able
to see nothing but the clods on which he has flung himself for safety, there to crouch — he
cannot anticipate — for minutes or for hours; he may feel in turn boredom, exultation, panic,
anger, sorrow, bewilderment, even that sublime emotion we call courage. And his perception
of community with his fellow soldiers will fluctuate in equal measure. Something like the
Guard Corps, an important reality for the German commander-in-chief at St. Privat, whether
he could see it or not, would probably have ceased to have much meaning for the ordinary
Guardsman once it had deployed beyond the boundaries of his vision; but he may still have
felt some sense of belonging, possibly to his battalion, probably to his company, until
confronted by some dramatic personal threat; then it must only have been the circle of his

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most immediate comrades which would have retained for him any extra-personal identity and
only their survival, so much bound up with his own, for which he would have striven. (Keegan

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1978, p. 46).

Battlefields are noisy, chaotic, dirty places; they are inhabited by people in various states of fear and

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panic, in the grips of all that the physical body lets loose when it switches to “fight or flight” mode;
under such conditions, the most well-organised of military teams runs the risk of falling apart into a
disparate group of individuals disconnected from each other and from the sense of anything other
than their immediate predicament. Military strategy is in large part about finding ways to resist the
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disintegration of coordinated units into frightened or uncontrollable individuals; it is about ensuring
the integration of the micro into the macro, and the maintenance of this integration under the most
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trying of circumstances.

Suggesting that battle is necessarily a clash of chaos and order invites us to think again about the
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significance and purposes of music on the battlefield. Two of the most common clichés about the
function of battle music — that it is intended to make the soldiers more aggressive, or the opposition
fearful — actually suggest that martial music is about chaos, since each of these is about heightening
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what, ultimately, are not entirely controllable emotions. They raise the risk of panic, including what
Randall Collins (2008) calls forward panic. Forward panics typically happen when the fear that
naturally emerges during any violent encounter suddenly dissipates, for example when combatants
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realise that their opponents are, in fact, defenceless. In some cases, rather than breathing a sigh of
relief, combatants instead surge forward and inflict widespread and ultimately pointless damage;
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this, Collins suggests, may explain many atrocities that occur in war. Panic in the more general sense
— running away from the fight, or being unable to do anything at all — is also extremely dangerous
on a battlefield, not least because of the risk it brings with it of triggering a forward panic on the
other side. Drawing on Collins and, like Collins on Émile Durkheim’s idea of social effervescence,
Paul Richards has thus suggested that

The soundscapes of war serve to control extreme forms of social effervescence in times of
war by applying a regulatory rhythm familiar from the parade ground. In ‘signalling an
advance’ and ‘beating a retreat’, collective memory is invoked and imposed upon the over-
emotional states otherwise liable to give rise to uncoordinated individual response (Richards
2013, 187).

I have made a similar argument in discussing the role of bagpipers during combat in the Scottish
tradition (Grant 2015). Here, I want to extend this discussion into at times more speculative terrain
in a manner which will, however, underline the importance of conducting more historical studies on
martial music.
One of the most fundamental challenges facing any musicologist of war is the profound lack of in-
depth historical studies of this phenomenon, particularly for the period before the eighteenth
century (this is significant not least because this period marks, to an extent the beginning of the end
for music on the battlefield). Most historians of military music take this later period as their main
focus, and although they certainly mention earlier examples, these discussions tend to be fleeting
and to an extent superficial, based on insufficient and not entirely reliable source material. In such
discussions, we see distinctions emerging which are important for later epochs as well: namely,
between music used for signalling in the context of battle, and music used for ritual or ceremonial
purposes outside of the immediate context of battle itself (but including such things as victory
parades).4 An exception to this is the tradition of sending not just individual musicians, but whole
bands onto the battlefield, something which for a long time — as far as the historical records can be
trusted — distinguished the armies of the Islamic east from those of the Christian west.5 Significant
developments in the type and number of instruments used in western contexts following periods of

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major conflict, especially the period after the Second Crusade and also the Turkish wars of the late
seventeenth century, can be regarded as material evidence for these differences. Historical sources

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include chronicles of the crusades.6

Such sources need to be approached with caution, however. Firstly, reports of battle are rarely

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written by those directly involved; secondly, war is about taking sides. Typical for writers then and
now is to focus on the sheer levels of noise created by the bands, leading to such descriptive terms as
the German word Kriegslärm — something which seems to be the very opposite of music.
Descriptions of battlefield music being loud and noisy tend not to be written from an emic
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perspective, however: this is important because describing “others” as noisy, and their music and
language as lacking structure, is a rhetorical device of exclusion and oppression that has been
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around since at least the early years of Athenian democracy (Hall 1991). Centring around the
contrast between the “civilised” and the “barbarian”, between the forces of order, and disorder,
musical equivalents of such discourse include the contrast between “music” and “noise”,
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“harmony” and “discord”.

It thus makes a very big difference whether we think of music on the battlefield as siding with order,
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or with chaos. But it is also worth considering if using music for the sheer noise it produces make
any sort of strategic sense. Battles are by their nature noisy places: they may have become more
noisy with the invention of gunpowder and further technical developments thereafter, but they were
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never quiet. Why add more noise, if it is just that — noise? The only possible way this could
constitute an advantage is if one’s enemy was not accustomed to such noise, and if they (or their
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horses, which in this period is just as important) could therefore not cope with this additional, sonic
weapon. As is well documented, such tactics have been used more recently in siege situations by the
US army, using not military bands but loudspeakers (Pieslak 2009; Volcler 2001).7 But the

4
This distinction is one often stressed by modern military musicians and also reflected in changing attitudes
to how musicians were classed and ranked (and budgeted for) in the army.
5
As many of the examples discussed here demonstrate, there were certainly western equivalents of such
traditions, though possibly not on the same scale or at the same points in history. The Scottish tradition of
sending pipers into combat, for example, does not go back further than the sixteenth century, though the use
of pipers may have been a continuation of a similar tradition using different instruments. Given the dearth
of studies on the topic, it is difficult at this point in time to make any reliable statements, something which, as
I suggest, places the entirety of my argument here — but also, alternative approaches — on very thin ice.
6
For an extensive discussion of these sources see Farmer 1949.
7
I am referring here in the first instance not to so-called sonic weapons, but the use of loud music to distract
and confuse the enemy, or in the case of a siege to wear them down.
continuing tendency to conflate “music” and “sound”, and to subsume both under what more
recently has been termed “sonic warfare”, or to talk about the “weaponisation” of music, is
problematic. Firstly, music is never simply sound: at the very least, music is organised sound. It could
be argued that sonic warfare is also a form of organised sound, at the very least it is intentional
sound: here there would indeed be an interesting continuity from earlier practices if, and only if,
accounts of those earlier practices could be fully trusted. But then as now, warfare is never just about
firepower in the broadest sense. The best of weapons is no more a guarantee of success than is a
greater mass of muscle — this misconception should surely have died the day that David felled
Goliath. Successful military endeavours are not just about firepower: they are about logistics,
organisation, morale. It is thus far from irrelevant that these are also the exact areas in which the
majority of martial musical practices are located: music used to help march men into position; to
organise their movements on the battlefield; and to support them emotionally both on the battlefield
and off. And at a time when most battlefield commands had to be given in acoustic form, would

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such an intense noise not prove a significant disadvantage for one’s own side as well? Not if the band
was, in fact, generating signals rather than noise — a distinction from modern information theory

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that is useful here as well, and which is lent credence by the fact that two of the instrument types so
often used (trumpet and double-reed instruments) have a very particular type of acoustic profile, a
spectral structure uniquely placed to cut through environmental noise.8

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The idea of music being an instrument of order rather than disorder on the battlefield runs exactly
counter to the prevalent idea that music in battle serves to incite certain emotional reactions —
aggression, or fear. It also presupposes that battlefield music is not just about sound, but about
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structured sound — and also about visual and material aspects of music, such as the exact
connotations of the instruments used, and the actual person of the musician. There are many levels
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on which music could be used to consolidate, maintain or restore order on the battlefield, a task
which, as suggested, can also be described as the integration of the micro- and macro-levels:
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1. The logistic level: Most obviously, music can contribute to order through relaying commands as
to what soldiers are to do, thus directly coordinating action on the battlefield. This was probably the
most long-standing of all traditions of martial music, being possibly the first use of music in warfare,
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and persisting until the First World War. This does not mean, however, that the tradition was in any
way static (more on this below), even if there is a striking level of similarity in the basic types of
instruments used in different cultures and at different times. The most typical ways in which music is
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used to this end are to signal attacks and retreats, as well as some other types of movement; more
work would need to be done to establish whether music was also used to rhythmically coordinate
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action when particular types of warfare call for this.9

2. The emotional level, in particular as a way to combat fear and panic. The question which
naturally arises is how this is achieved. As suggested, the default setting in many discussions of music
during battle is to favour neo-platonic explanations whereby certain types of music trigger certain
emotions (such as aggression, or the even more vaguely defined courage). This idea does not stand
up to much analysis, however, at least for as long as we suggest that the triggers are somehow “in”
the music as opposed to working “through” the music, which brings us to the next level:

8
I am grateful to Christoph Reuter for this information.
9
Such as, potentially, the system of rotating ranks of musketeers to enable continuous fire despite long
reloading times. The system developed in the later sixteenth century and has been linked to the increased
importance of drill and discipline in the military around the same time (c.f. e.g. Black 1991, pp. 3-4). I have
no evidence that music played a role here, and mention this only as an example of fighting skills that require
exact temporal coordination and where music, for that reason, could be beneficial.
3. The ideological/social level: Ideological and social at one and the same time, because the social
relationships concerned do not relate to the primary group alone, but also imply secondary groups
whose presence is expressed through ideas about what this group is, its history, and so on. This level
is closely related to the cognitive level to the extent that music can thus be used to point beyond the
immediacy of battle to a prevailing political order, to the higher-level social group who is at war, be
this the regiment, or the state, or a particular nobleman. This, in turn, can help soldiers deal with
their individual sense of fear and panic by reintegrating them into the idea of a larger whole which
they share with those around them. The benefits of this type of strategy are probably contingent on
the constitution of the fighting unit — it suits an era of mercenaries much less than an era of
standing armies in nation states.

4. The cosmological level: Similar to the ideological/social levels (in practice,they often they
interact), music can point to a higher, divine order, and thus place combat in a spiritual rather than

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a secular frame. Convincing evidence for these connections can be found in the fact that the
instruments most often linked with battle are often also those which are linked with power both

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terrestrial and divine (especially, trumpets and drums). As I will discuss later, the connections
between martial practices and ritual are manifold and significant.

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The final level is in some ways the most fundamental, a common denominator in some aspects to all
the other levels mentioned, though not entirely subsumed by them:

5. The temporal level: Physical violence, like the pain which it causes, happens in the here and
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now (von Trotha 1997); simultaneously, however, many first-person accounts of battle and of
atrocities in wartime take place seemingly “out of time”, with the person testifying often describing
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the experience as in a sense unreal, dreamlike. Music offers an alternative timeframe which works in
both of these instances in slightly different ways. It points to a time that is separate from, and thus
beyond the battle, simply by itself having its own internal temporal frame but also, in the sense of
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levels 3 and 4, in pointing to orders existing before the battle and which (one hopes) continue
hereafter, either in this life or the next. But music can also reimpose the sense of the present, and a
present with a temporal flow. Either way, music reintroduces a sense of time to the battlefield.
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What do we know about the music used on the battlefield that could back these theories up? The
most simple answer is: not enough, though my own investigations into the role of pipers in battle
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(Grant 2015) provides some initial evidence in support of this alternative vision. The military piping
tradition is important not least because it was probably the last of the many comparable traditions
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to die out. Pipers did not give signals as buglers or drummers did, though their playing did indeed
signal the commencement of the offensive, and — for as long as the piper survived — its
continuation. On that level, though, such music can indeed be considered as a signal, though in a
less limited sense than how we usually think of that term.

The distinction between signalling and other forms of music on the battlefield may in any case need
to be reconsidered. In their later forms, musical signals used on the battlefield were relatively short,
and by nature very distinctive, their use tending towards the purely denotational; often, this has led
to this practice being largely discounted in musicological discussions.10 As Silke Wenzel (2016) has
demonstrated, however, it was not always thus. Her analysis of existing sources of battlefield music
from the sixteenth century shows that there was extensive scope for musicians to improvise around

10
Reams of paper in several disciplines have been filled and frequently, wasted on why music’s non-
denotational quality differentiates it from language; at one and the same time, forms of music which clearly
do have a denotational quality are often dismissed as “not really music.” Perhaps a future Balzan project
could investigate the history of such music-ontological fallacies…
what she calls the “core signal”.11 This observation is important because it muddies the clear ground
that emerges later between what in German is called Feldmusik and other forms of military music,
and invites us to consider whether signalling practices were more closely related to other types of
battlefield music.

I suggested above that battlefield music in general needs to be approached as a signal through the
noise, not noise itself. Talking in such information-theoretical terms also makes it possible to look at
musical communication on much broader terms, and in particular to address once more the
tendency to focus on music as sound. For despite the aforementioned acoustic benefits of several
types of martial musical instrument, it is open to debate whether and to what extent the ordering
agent of music could always be reliably heard through the chaos, or whether soldiers in the
perceptual parallel world of battle would be conscious of the music. This is especially the case for
more modern forms of warfare, though the long-standing tradition of equipping field musicians

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with differently coloured uniforms, and in the case of the cavalry sitting them on grey horses, may
suggest a need to distinguish them visually as well. This tradition had the unfortunate side-effect of

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making it easier to pick out, and hence kill, the musicians; it was abandoned for this reason.

However, given that some uses of music in signalling did carry on for many centuries after other

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forms of music on the battlefield, including in eras when the sound of battle made it increasingly
difficult to hear the signals, acoustic percipience or lack thereof cannot the only reason for the
demise of music on Western battlefields. This demise follows a roughly parallel trajectory to the rise
of the aesthetics of absolute music on the one hand, the commercial music industry and, later,
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recorded sound on the other. Both of these trends affect the way we think about what music is, how
it works, and its roles in society, impacting significantly on our relationship to musical activities; both
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developments also put increasing focus on the sound of music as opposed to its visual or haptic
qualities. The rise of a high-art, work concept-laden aesthetics of music ultimately had a negative
impact on perceptions of military music along with many other forms of popular music. The
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changing roles of music in war may thus have much to do with changes in musical life and in
thinking about music more generally.
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Developments in military organisation play a central role as well, of course. In western Europe, the
military band advanced as the use of music on the field of battle retreated. The military band
continued to play and parade long after the drums and bugles of battle fell silent, and continues to
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play today, but at increasingly great distances from the battlefield.12 What we are dealing with, here,
is a similar separation of “art” from “life” that can be seen in many other aspects of musical culture
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in roughly the same period. Because we have as yet so little reliable information on other forms of
music on the battlefield, it is difficult to make any further assertions about the exact nature of this
relationship. Nevertheless, as I shall suggest in the next section, some general observations generally
on the ways warfare changed over may help explain why music was at one point commonplace on
the battlefield, and why this changed.

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11
A similar observation with regard to herders’ signals in Germany was made by Christian Kaden (1977).
12
Until the early 1990s, military musicians in the British Army, like in many other armies, were also
employed as first-aiders and were thus also stationed in combat zones. More recently, however, this practice
was discontinued. The result is that while military musicians are still flown into combat zones to provide
musical entertainment to troops stationed there, they no longer experience the day-to-day life of troops
deployed in a war zone to anything like the same extent. This one example is, I would argue, symptomatic of
the larger trends I am discussing here.
War is a form of collective violence, and the damage and destruction caused by war reaches far
beyond that possible from the sum of its individual actors. In part, this is because of the importance
of group dynamics in persuading people to do things that normally, they would never do, such as kill
people, maim them, torture them (Browning 1992, Welzer 2005). But is also because of the high
levels of organisation that are characteristic of war and its associated institutions, institutions
predicated on the use of force.

In The Politics of Collective Violence (Tilly 2003), Charles Tilly presents a basic typology of seven
different forms such violence can take “in terms of the social processes that generate them, not in
terms of the motives and emotions carried by damage-doing people” (p. 16). Tilly analyses each
basic type according to a number of factors, including the level of coordination among its agents,
the level of damage caused, and various mechanisms and processes that trigger the violence. Most
wars and similar, large-scale armed conflicts fall under his category of coordinated destruction, in

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which people or organisations who specialise in coercive means engage upon a programme of
extensive violence. I would argue, however, that certain historical forms of battle within war fall into

AF
the category Tilly calls violent rituals, and that this offers us a new perspective for understanding the
significance of music on the battlefield.

DR
Tilly suggests thinking of collective claim-making “as an interactive performance: like veteran
members of a theatrical troupe, political actors follow rough scripts to uncertain outcomes […] In
any particular regime, pairs of actors have only a limited number of performances at their disposal.
We can conveniently call that set of performances their repertoire of contention” (Tilly 2003, p. 45).
N
As his further discussion demonstrates, Tilly’s recourse to the language of theatre and performance
is not merely metaphorical. Drawing on his own work into the repertoire of contentions in 1750s
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Britain, he lists examples which include rough music,13 celebrations of major events and holidays,
and the salutation or deprecation of public figures at theatre. As he continues,
SS

How do repertoires shape contentious politics? Most obviously, they provide approximate
scenarios — and choices among scenarios — for political interactions. With scenarios
available, participants on all sides can generally coordinate their actions more effectively,
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anticipate likely consequences of various responses, and construct agreed-upon meanings for
contentious episodes. (p. 46).
S

While these remarks are directed at the sphere of doing politics generally, including as a way to
understand why some types of political interaction result in violence, nowhere is the recourse to
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scenarios and scripts more obvious than in the case of what he calls “violent rituals”, the main
characteristics of which are as follows (I have slightly abbreviated his own summary to include the
most relevant points for my own argument):

In violent rituals, at least one relatively well-defined and coordinated group follows a known
interaction script entailing the infliction of damage on themselves or others as they compete
for priority within a recognized arena. […] Violent rituals provide the extreme case of
coordination among violent actors. Thus violent rituals simultaneously exaggerate and
discipline features that are visible in other forms of collective violence. […] They give

13
“Rough music” is one English form of practices of folk justice found all over Europe at one time, often
grouped together under the general name “charivari”. Like the German name for one of these related
traditions, Katzenmusik, the term “rough music” relates to the importance of forms of musical or proto-
musical behaviour in these practices, which were generally shaming ceremonies carried out at night, and
signalled through the use of loud and discordant sound made either on conventional musical instruments or
objects such as pots and pans. The classic text on these traditions is Le Goff & Schmitt (eds.) 1981; on rough
music specifically see also e.g. Thompson 1992.
 unusually sharp definition to the identities in play: boundaries between parties, stories about
those boundaries, relations across those boundaries, and relations within those boundaries.
[…] Participants in violent rituals ordinarily tolerate a very limited range of damaging actions,
punishing or excluding participants who violate those limits. They establish unusually clear
criteria for success and failure, with victors frequently celebrating their triumphs immediately,
boastfully, even cruelly. Those who organize violent rituals also dramatize differences among
categories of participants by such devices as assigning them distinctive costumes (pp. 82-84).

Tilly goes on to note various mechanisms and processes that are associated with violent rituals,
including competitive display, monitoring of the actions to ensure their containment in line with the
relevant conventions, and certification/decertification (“validation of actors, their performance, and
their claims by external authorities” (p. 85) and, in the case of decertification, removal of such
validation). Tilly describes how such violent rituals often look like “contained versions of war” (p.

T
86). They include such things are fights between rival gangs, shaming ceremonies, but also many
sports. He argues that while many aspects of violent rituals are also found in the type of collective

AF
violence he terms coordinated destruction, the former is much more contained, making clearer
distinctions between who does or does not participate, who can be targeted, and what modes of
attack may be used; the role of monitors is more significant in the case of violent rituals as well.

DR
I have introduced this aspect of Tilly’s typology since it seems to me a particularly useful way to
think again about many aspects of warfare, and particularly the social and cultural practices
surrounding warfare — including music. For although Tilly is right to situate war generally in the
N
category of coordinated destruction, the proximity of many aspects of military tradition to violent
ritual is worthy of more extended analysis. We should note, for one thing, the importance of many
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things which Tilly regards as violent rituals in most military organisations, such as shaming
ceremonies (see e.g. Grant 2013); from this point of view, we may consider viewing military life as
organised around a series of violent rituals, which also include battle. Most martial cultures have
SS

systems for validating the performance of combatants, praising those who do well and shaming or
ostracising those who do not — in modern military organisations, this takes the form of the award
of medals and other forms of distinction. Using music to signal charge and retreat — beginning and
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end — has symbolic as well as practical value; likewise traditions whereby the defeated side were
allowed to leave the battlefield with full music and banners (with “the honours of war”, as it was
called). Then there is the fact that in some periods, coming into possession of the opposite side’s
S

most important colours or instruments was effectively a sign of victory: this is why contemporary
commentators trying to establish who actually won the Battle of Lützen sometimes based their
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verdicts on the number of colours or flags seized by each side; one source pointed to the fact that the
Swedes had also captured twenty-eight cornets (Schürger 2015, p. 350). It is worth noting, here, that
Tilly regard many types of sporting events as violent rituals: the connection to warfare is most
obvious in the case of jousting, gladiatorial contests, and the martial arts, the origins of which do
indeed lie in the practicalities of learning to fight, demonstrating one’s fighting prowess, and
through this demonstration gaining honour and potentially, status (see here e.g. Desch Obi 2008).
Even seemingly unrelated sports, such as football, share more of the features of historical forms of
battle than we might realise; and though sports are a particularly exaggerated form of violent ritual,
the essence of many aspects of that ritual can be traced back to martial traditions.

It may seem cynical to compare war with sports in this way, or to suggest that major international
conflicts have something in common with organised hooliganism and street fights. My point,
however, is that if we follow Tilly and others in analysing violence as a form of social interaction,
then features such as the recourse to musical practices become much more important in
understanding what is going on, or what is meant to be going on. (The distinction is a significant one,
because as we have seen, how war is presented or anticipated and how it is experienced in reality,
are not the same thing). This is impotant precisely because one of the key aspects of violent ritual
that distinguishes it from coordinated destruction in Tilly’s typology is containment; if we remove
constraints on acceptable targets, acceptable modes of attack, and on the temporal frame of the
violent encounter, there is a severe risk of escalation and atrocities.

Let us think again, then, about the implications of having music on the battlefield: not just as a
signal, and not just as a preliminary sonic charge, but as an accompaniment to the course of battle
itself. For one thing, this suggests geographical containment, and probably also temporal
containment. If a band is to accompany a battle, or at the very least to signal the battle’s
progression, this implies a certain temporal proximity of the soldiers; furthermore, no musician can
play indefinitely, and there are generally fewer, if any, musical reinforcements to count on. But
battlefield music also says something about the way people thought about battle. It emphasises a
view of combat not so much as performance (this is too modern an idea to apply here) but as a type
of ritual. And this is important precisely because rituals have a form, they adhere to laws, they have

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a beginning and an end. This does not mean that rituals cannot be associated with what we regard
as horrific and extensive violence: there is every reason to believe that a ritualistic setting may make

AF
it easier to inflict or justify violence; this is the main reasons why ritual (and its first cousin, discipline)
are so significant in military organisations. The point, however, is that by setting the parameters
within which violence can occur, rituals enable violence but simultaneously place constraints upon it.

DR
These constraints can change significantly in different cultural contexts, and for outsiders the
parameters may be misunderstood as indicating the lack of boundaries rather than their presence.
Take the example of cannibalism, which for centuries if not millenia has been used by cultures
which do not practice it as an indication of the savagery of cultures which do. Discussing Carib
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warfare from the sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, however, Neil Whitehead describes a
dance performed by warriors after killing, during which they tasted the flesh and blood of those they
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had killed as a means of overcoming the deed, “a means by which the warrior could distance
himself from the trauma of killing” (Whitehead 1990, p. 153). In this way, what is often regarded as
a practice demonstrating the complete absence of moral boundaries may in fact have been a way to
SS

contain violence: “Our own cultural revulsion towards acts of physical cannibalism[…] should not
distract us from the possibility that it was precisely an equivalent disgust that Carib rituals were
designed to elicit, thus placing a clear boundary between civil and military aspects of their
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society” (Whitehead 1990, p. 168).

I have already pointed to the problematic tendency, which is exaggerated in wartime, of drawing
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divisions between “civilised” and “uncivilised” or “barbarian” acts. This is important here not least
because the constraints we impose upon violence represent the view of the perpetrator, not the
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victim. Likewise, historians and other researchers working on violence are split on the question of
whether humankind is becoming more or less violent, more or less “barbaric” (see here especially
Kassimeris (ed.( 2006). The question is difficult to answer not least because it depends on historically
contingent ideas about what is legitimate and illegitimate, moral and immoral, what constitutes
violence, what constitutes barbarity.14 Where all researchers agree, however, is that in terms of
actual deaths and casualties as a result of war (and in particular, civilian casualties), the twentieth
century has seen a dramatic increase. Technology can be blamed in part: deadlier weapons lead to
more deaths. At the same time, however, weapons are not developed and do not proliferate in a
vacuum. To focus on technology alone is to deflect attention away from the decision to design,
manufacture and use that technology. Not just the technology itself, then, but the norms and
traditions guiding its use are relevant here — as the debate on gun control in the USA makes only
too clear. It may therefore be something other than a coincidence that the age where any form of
music on the battlefield, and associated rituals, has receded has also been the age in which several

14
Note, for example, that the phrase “barbarity” implies not simply violence, but excessive or extreme
violence: in other words, it carries within it the implication that some types of violence are more legitimate or
morally acceptable than others.
boundaries of war have collapsed, most obviously the boundary between combatant and civilian.
Over the same time, we see changes in other aspects of battle and war, such as the move from
“demonstrative” to camouflaging uniforms, and the falling-away of related traditions such as the
carrying of standards in battle.15

All this is a way of arguing that the impact of technology on the demise of martial music is not
limited to increased “noise”: rather, it is about the way that technology changes the way that soldiers
do or do not interact directly on the battlefield, and about changes that extend beyond the merely
technical. Disparate methods of warfare, such as air attacks, happen on too diffuse a stage, in too
large an arena, for a centralised music to have any function. Changes in the ways we regulate war
are relevant here as well, as further evidence for the general trend. The twentieth century has seen a
sharp increase in attempts to contain war legally, both through distinctions between legal and illegal
wars and also through classifying certain acts of war, notably intentional attacks on civilians, as war

T
crimes. Law in this sense — the law of statutes, of written agreement — is one of the most
fundamental underpinnings of modern society, and has to a large extent replaced ritual as the

AF
primary instrument of normativity in our societies (scratch the surface, of course, and law itself
reveals itself to be fundamentally ritual and theatrical in nature; see here e.g. the essays in Gephart
(ed.), forthcoming). Rarely, however, is our globalised and institutionalised system of law musical in

DR
the direct sense, a peculiarity that becomes clear only when we compare this system to alternative
traditions such as those of many North American indigenous nations, but which also presents itself
when we consider the extent to which earlier European discourses on law and justice so frequently
referred to musical categories and iconography, and also integrated musical practices into systems
N
for the performance of justice — including in many of the shaming practices which Tilly classes as
forms of violent ritual.
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——————————
SS

In this essay I have suggested that the gradual decline in significance of music on the battlefield can
be understood as more than just a by-product of technical developments, more than just “collateral
damage” to use the euphemism that so neatly captures contemporary warfare’s contempt for its
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mostly civilian victims. Musical practices are more than sound: they are markers of how we
understand and frame particular activities and interactions. Musical communication is one of the
most important ways in which we form, perform, signal, express and give meaning to relationships.
S

Where a musical practice falls into misuse, we may presume that the relational context within which
that practice was used has also changed. The question that arises, the analysis we needs then pursue,
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is how the context has changed, and whether the demise of the musical practice is a symptom, or at
least partially a cause. The distancing of music from the moment of battle itself, its restriction to the
no less important but peripheral functions of training, recuperation, commemoration and
glorification, is a symptom not so much of the mechanisation of warfare but the rationalisation of
its execution. The First World War, that turning point in so many regards, also marks the clear
endpoint for very many practices of using music on the battlefield.

And yet it may seem ironic, short-sighted or contemptuous to draw these conclusions from a starting
point that focused on what has been termed “one of the longest and most tragic” battles of the
Thirty Years War (Schürger 2015, p. 28), a war understood to have exceeded every possibly
boundary in terms of the damage and destruction it caused, especially to the civilian population.
The fact that this destruction was almost certainly related to the sheer length of the War does not
change this basic fact, and reminds us to be cautious — very cautious — in diagnosing general
trends of the sort that proclaim the world is becoming more or less violent, more or less brutal. The

15
“Standards” here meaning flags/colours, although as I suggest, these may be regarded as symbolic of other
types of standard as well.
comments I make about music in battle need to be understood as just that: they do not apply to
other situations of violence in wartime, particularly not the types of ransacking, rape and pillage
that were the main source of civilians casualties over the period of the Thirty Years War, and which
present a very different type of violent interaction. The nature of battle is any case such that ideas
about its containment, its order, are at best relative. Tilly’s typology, too, is not meant to be
understood in terms of discreet categories: he traces, as well, typical ways in which one type of
collective violence can quickly transform or escalate into another.

Such words of caution must necessarily also be applied to the historiography of music in war. A first
and obvious counterclaim could be that in focusing on music as order, I am myself buying into a
narrative about military discipline and order, and the role of music within this, which itself is a
product of its time (as Kate van Orden (2005) has explored in some detail). Critiquing the idea of a
“military revolution” both in weaponry but more importantly, in military organisation in the early

T
seventeenth century, Jeremy Black has argued that

AF
The idea of battlefield or siege techniques as causing and in part constituting a military
revolution pays insufficient attention to the inchoate nature of much fighting and military
organisation in this period. The strains of prolonged warfare led rulers to desire effective

DR
military instruments, but they also made them difficult to provide. (Black 1991, p. 17)

Taking a step back from such specific manifestations and conceptions of order and viewing these
developments, instead, through the lens of ritual and normativity, may however help us position
N
these developments within a much larger and also more global framework, linking these with
anthropological studies on violence as ritual as well.
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It also needs to be stressed once again that without further and meticulous studies of how music was
actually used in war and without using the results of such studies to embark on a comparative
SS

analysis of the development of martial musical practices relative to other aspects of warfare, any
theory of music and war must remain, to a large extent, speculation. This is a problem we share
with those working in other disciplines. In his thesis on the battlefield archeology of Lützen, André
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Schürger (2015) has argued that what actually happened there quickly became submerged by
differing accounts of the day’s proceedings. And as Keegan had suggested some forty years
previously, the facts of battle and the narratives of battle rarely concur; our narratives, too, place an
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order onto battle that is wholly absent from the individual’s experience of it. In our analysis, both
emic and etic approaches are thus necessary if we are to sort out fact from fiction and, yet, to
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remember that fiction, like myth, is also a form of truth. This is particularly the case when we are
dealing with the testimony of people who have experienced war and other forms of collective
violence first hand. The historical anthropologist Hans Mendick has drawn attention to the ways in
which people who experienced the Thirty Years War quickly adopted the topos of naming it as
such, thereby turning three decades worth of events and processes and fear and suffering into
something like one enormous event, insodoing making it history. As he describes

wherever the authors begin to speak of what is special about the events that they have
experienced in conjunction with the general context of the experience of the war, they
characterize it as a unique excess of violence, destruction, suffering and fear, such as has never
before been experienced—as a rupture in experience that surpasses the experiences of war of
all preceding generations (Mendick 2010).

This view of the Thirty Years War, Mendick argues, was to continue until the next war to be termed
the “Great” War; the parallels between the two in terms of the way historical memories of these
conflicts have been formed are indeed striking. Mendick also explores how discourses around the
Thirty Years War contrasted ideas of order and lack of order; and also tried to place the events into
a higher order as well: examples include some accounts’ reference to a comet that appeared in the
sky in 1618 and remained for thirty days, later interpreted as an omen regarding the three decades
over which the war would be fought; and the accounts given by Hans Heberle, who settled on thirty
as the number of times that he had had to seek refuge in the walled city of Ulm from soldiers
encroaching on his village. In such strategies, we sense an intense hope that those really were
exceptional times; we sense an existential need to erect boundaries around those events, to close
them off, to contain them. Whether processing the immediate experience of battle or many decades
of want and fear, combatants and civilians alike respond to the same basic need: to clearly mark the
boundaries between war and peace.

Those who experienced the Thirty Years War had to deal with the additional struggle of a
contemporary belief that suffering of this type and intensity was a form of divine retribution. I have
suggested above that the links between music and war can often be explored on a cosmological level,

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and it is worth considering whether increasing secularisation has been an additional factor in the
gradual seepage of meaning from the musical practices of war. Yet despite the demise of the theory

AF
of war as divine retribution, we still seem very quick to accept that war is in principle inevitable; the
continuing tendency to demonise our enemies is a continuation, under the mantle of secularism, of
the idea that war is a play of non-human forces that cannot be contained by humane means alone.

DR
So in response we torture them; we overstep what we have set up as the ultimate boundary,16 and in
a vain attempt to stay on the right side of that boundary, we step back into the frame of ritual
without realising it. And because this is ritual, we use music. We explain music’s usefulness here by
referring to by scientific theories of psychological torture, or via the now familiar explanation of the
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sheer noise it makes.17 But no amount of reasoning can hide the fact that in so doing we have
merely reactivated the practices of those forebears from whom we pride ourselves so distant, so
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advanced. It is the old, old story of warfare and its contradictions writ anew, the story of us trying to
impose order on a chaos that is, ultimately, entirely of our own making.
SS

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16
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17
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