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

Johnson-Williams, Erin

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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.

Citation

Johnson-Williams, E. (2023). ‘The Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Suffering in the South African War. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 20(1), 119-151. https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479409822000040

Journal Article Type Article
Online Publication Date Apr 6, 2022
Publication Date 2023-04
Deposit Date Apr 6, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Nineteenth-Century Music Review
Print ISSN 1479-4098
Electronic ISSN 2044-8414
Publisher Cambridge University Press
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 20
Issue 1
Pages 119-151
DOI https://doi.org/10.1017/s1479409822000040

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