Music as Ritualized Violence, Part 1: Introduction

The ancient Scots blared bagpipes before a battle in order to stir the emotions of their own fighters and strike fear in the hearts of the enemy. Ottoman Turks accompanied their regimens with a battery of clanging percussion, and the sound of cymbals was described in European concert music for the next couple hundred years as the "Turkish style." In perhaps one of most disturbing scenes in Apocalypse Now (a rare distinction in a film with so much of "the horror"), American helicopters conduct a bombing raid on Vietnamese hamlets with Wagner's "The Ride of the Valkyries" blasting on their speaker systems. In 1989, the US army blared loud music in an attempt to induce Panamanian president Manuel Noriega's surrender. The method was called "acoustic bombardment."

These are just a few instances - factual and fictional - where music has played a role in warfare. Since the beginning of the so-called "War on Terror" and the invasion of Iraq, however, music has come to play an even more minatory role in US military operations. In addition to using loud music during attacks - probably for similar reasons as the Scots with their bagpipes (to inspire your own and scare the Other) - music has becoming a standard "enhanced interrogation technique" in places like Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. In other words, music is now being used as a form of torture.

Perhaps the only piece of research on this fascinating topic has been conducted and published by NYU musicology professor Suzanne Cusick (2006). According to Cusick, the roots of this novel technique were first institutionalized in a CIA handbook from the early 1960s, and the method has been employed by US and other intelligence agencies ever since as a form of "no-touch torture." Amazingly, this is how the original developers of this technique viewed it, and they actually used the word "torture" in their documents.

The advantages of "no-touch torture" are many. No physical harm is done to the detainee besides possible damage to the ears, something less quantifiable than a bruise or a cut: rather, the violence is all in the mind. According to Cusick's research and articles reported by the BBC, US interrogators have instigated this "mental violence" in two different way, often in tandem - by playing music at very high decibel levels, and by repeating the same song over and over again. Pieces of music that have been used in this way include Metallica's "Enter Sandman," Eminem's "Slim Shady," and - not at all surprisingly - "I Love You," the Barney theme song.

Anyone who has ever had a song involuntarily running in his or her head for hours knows that music has the capacity to torture, to frazzle one's sense of control and psychological equanimity. I remember the climactic scene in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing when Radio Raheem walks into the Italian-owned pizzeria and blasts Public Enemy's "Fight the Power" until the owner, driven crazy, utters the single word that results in a near race-riot (hint: Michael Richards said the same thing). Yes, music can drive us mad. In our aestheticized musical culture, where music is considered beautiful and one of the pantheon of "the fine arts," the violent aspect of organized sound poses many provocative questions. What is it psychologically about certain music that serves as a stand-in for physical violence? What mechanisms are at work within the music itself? This post is an attempt to grapple with a few of these questions.

The seminal piece of research on the topic is philosopher Jacques Attali's Noise: The Political Economy of Music (1985), perhaps the most-cited musicological work that was written by a non-musician. Many of his arguments are dense (plus ça change, French post-modernism!), but I'll try to rehash the one that has the most bearing on the present discussion. Attali argues that from its earliest days, music has always been bound to religion and social organization. Again, like the Scots, social organization since the beginning of our species has come in two forms: how do we organize and stay cohesive, and what do we do about the other guys? How early people channeled noise as a symbolic force was of critical importance to the social well-being of the group. Attali writes (his italics): "Noise is violence: it disturbs. To make noise is to interrupt a transmission, to disconnect, to kill. It is a simulacrum of murder. Music is a channelization of noise, and therefore a simulacrum of the sacrifice. It is thus a sublimation, an exacerbation of the imaginary, at the same time as the creation of social order and political integration."

Unpacking that, the basic point is this: music is controlled noise, and noise is sonic violence. How a society makes its music, the codes that it employs, thus reflects profoundly on the power structure of the society. Again (last time!), Attali: "The game of music resembles the game of power: monopolize the right to violence; provoke anxiety and then provide a feeling of security; provoke disorder and then propose order; create a problem in order to solve it." Aesthetics is a modern invention: at its root, music is primordially both a psychological bond and a psychological weapon. It is both life-affirming transcendence and life-denying annihilation.

[This is the introduction to the topic: I will be following up shortly with concrete examples. But it's already 9:30 and I better get to work...]