Emotion, Bodily Discipline, and American Military Music in the 19th and 20th Century

Military music has existed for thousands of years but few scholars have devoted serious, critical attention to it. In this paper, I propose a framework for understanding why military music is important, with the United States in the nineteenth and twentieth century as a case study. “Military music” refers to four phenomena: (1) music for signals and communication, directing and regulating troop movements in camp and in battle, (2) music to entertain and boost morale of troops and sometimes civilians, (3) ceremonial music, and (4) music to frighten or intimidate enemies. This music, then, has both functional and affective purposes, producing both physical responses and psychological/emotional reactions, in order to get soldiers to engage in certain kinds of behavior and perform certain kinds of military labor. Drawing on the history of emotions, the sociology of labor, and extensive archival research, this presentation will show how music has been used as a tool of what sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “emotional management”—the active shaping of one’s feelings to conform to norms about the type and amount of emotion appropriate to experience and express in a particular professional situation. Indeed, music is especially potent for emotional management because it is experience both individually and socially, internally and externally, and has the capacity both to assuage feelings of alienation and enhance group cohesion and morale. I contend that music helps soldiers form what the historian of emotions Barbara Rosenwein calls “emotional communities”—which she defines as groups of people with common goals, values, or interests, who share a common constellation of emotions—and these communities help their members perform their work as soldiers. On an individual basis, music can help soldiers manage emotions; on a social basis, music can bind soldiers together and improve the efficiency of their labor.