My Music My War emerges at a particularly opportune moment in the study of music, violence, and trauma. With thousands of US soldiers returning home from the American wars on Iraq and Afghanistan, folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and other ethnographers have turned their attention toward understanding soldier experiences. Jonathan Pieslak’s Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (2009) and J. Martin Daughtry’s Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma, and Survival in Wartime Iraq (2015) are but two (very different) examples of recent ethnomusicological studies of music, sound, and trauma in the “War on Terror.” Likewise, George Gittoes’s documentary, Soundtrack to War (2005), boldly reveals the various ways in which soldiers produce, consume, and engage with music during deployment. It is within this seemingly crowded landscape that Lisa Gilman has successfully contributed a timely, relevant, and skillfully written ethnography of everyday soldier experience. This book succeeds not in its musical analysis (Pieslak), theoretical contributions (Daughtry), or depth of ethnographic data (Gittoes) per se, but rather in its ability to draw from, assemble, and articulate aspects of each of these areas. The result is an accessibly written, comprehensive, and thoughtful study that seeks at every opportunity to humanize and by extension complicate our understanding of soldier life.
In My Music My War Gilman explores the myriad ways in which soldiers use music to make meaning for themselves, to make sense of their surroundings, and to build community both during war and after. Gilman correctly sees troops’ everyday listening habits as a lens through which to explore larger, more complicated and contradictory forces. Processes of identity formation, masculinity, patriotism, violence, and trauma are each manifest in, and negotiated through, musical behavior. And this book very skillfully demonstrates how music plays a central role in each of these areas. While soldiers have always consumed and produced music during war, Gilman correctly recognizes that recent technological developments have dramatically changed the ways in which US troops acquire, access, share, and engage with music. The portability and ubiquity of music during war has allowed it to permeate virtually every aspect of soldier experience. My Music My War acknowledges the long history of wartime music production and consumption, while recognizing that iPods, earphones, and MP3s, have fundamentally changed the war experience, offering opportunities for isolation as well as connection, engagement, and escapism.
The book divides roughly into three sections: an introduction to the subject and to life in the US military; a series of chapters on the listening practices and experiences of soldiers during deployment; and finally a concluding set of chapters focused on reintegration and the psychological aftereffects of war. Throughout each of these three sections Gilman critically investigates the various ways in which soldiers use music as a means to orient themselves to their surroundings, to create communities of support, and to ameliorate the traumas of war. That being said, I sincerely appreciate Gilman’s efforts to humanize soldier experience outside of contemporary political debate. She very effectively writes against the prevailing discourses that romanticize soldiers as either hyper-masculine “patriotic heroes” or as traumatized “victims.” Instead, Gilman seeks out opportunities to bring to light the messy and often contradictory aspects of soldier life. Throughout the text Gilman eschews opportunities to make political gain, and instead, allows soldiers to speak for themselves. What is revealed is a more messy, complex, and nuanced depiction of soldier experience that forces readers to confront their own prejudices and biases.
While the principal audience for this text will likely be music scholars, Gilman’s approach to difficult political issues, her cogent explanation of complex theoretical concepts, and her artful assemblage of diverse ethnographic source materials make this book valuable to a broadly interdisciplinary audience of folklorists and ethnomusicologists. In contrast to other studies on this topic, this book is incredibly accessible for general audiences. Over the last two years I have had great success teaching this book at the undergraduate level, and would highly recommend it for adoption in general ethnomusicological courses on nationalism, violence, and contemporary American society. Many, if not all, of the songs, movies, and videos discussed in this text are easily accessed online, providing a useful pedagogical tool in the classroom. My students have found this text to be interesting, relevant, and applicable to their daily lives. Moreover, they have been nearly unanimous that I retain this book for future iterations of my “Music and Violence” course. The introductory chapters provide easily digestible discussions of music and identity, while the later chapters offer rich case studies in violence, masculinity, trauma, healing, and activism. As a whole the text is concise, well organized, and artfully written to accommodate any syllabus. For my undergraduate students, this text has been an invaluable resource for documenting and humanizing the myriad experiences of soldiers fighting America’s wars on Iraq and Afghanistan. Its relevance to contemporary American social and political life makes it an essential read for folklorists and ethnomusicologists interested in the post 9/11 era.
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[Review length: 822 words • Review posted on December 5, 2017]