Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War (review)

Musical scholarship of the last decade has produced the first serious studies of the intersections of music and conflict/violence/warfare through the work of such scholars as Suzanne Cusick and J. Martin Daughtry.¹ Jonathan Pieslak joins their ranks with Sound Targets: American Soldiers and Music in the Iraq War, the first book-length examination of music and musical practices surrounding that particular conflict. In undertaking this research, the author squarely positions himself within both the military cultures of the United States and that of its opponents in Iraq, relying primarily on interviews with American soldiers (at home) and recruiting videos from both sides.

Given the book’s topic, its appearance understandably evoked media attention like few musicological publications before: Sound Targets became the topic for blog entries (including one on Alex Ross’s The Rest Is Noise), squibs in papers and magazines (e.g., The New Yorker, The London Review of Books, and The Guardian), and interviews with the author on the BBC and local television. It was shocking for the public to discover how music, that source of pleasure and personal expression for so many of us, could be conscripted for acts of violence, whether to pump up soldiers before a mission or to force information out of detainees. However, the media largely chose to pick up on these disturbing aspects of the book and then produce sensational exposés of the secret psychological world of the Iraq War rather than seriously engage with Pieslak’s publication. Such limited, even superficial readings of Sound Targets do not do justice to the author’s overall attempt to situate the musical experiences of American soldiers in Iraq within the contexts of historical precedents, cultural influences, musical styles, personal identity, and human expression.

Pieslak certainly did not intend for his book to be an easy or comfortable read, and not just because of his controversial topic of music and war. The comments by soldiers about music and warfare are chilling, the song lyrics include profanity and offensive remarks, and the recruiting videos by Islamic State of Iraq, Fatah, and Hamas will undoubtedly offend sensitive viewers (they are posted online). Pieslak himself adopts provocative viewpoints at various points in the text. Wishing to challenge academics and the general reading public in their attitudes toward musical experience and the military, the author argues, for example, that the Society for Ethnomusicology needed “to account for the legal complexities of music in interrogation” (98) and to undertake “ethnographic research with soldiers” before having released its statement that decried how “music in interrogation is torture” (97). At the same time, Pieslak qualifies or explains his own positions and approaches throughout the book, which—considering the material he presents—is good and necessary, whether introducing himself and his qualifications/limitations for this research (13–14), repeatedly assuring that the recruiting videos of the “opposing forces” do not represent “broad cultural sentiments within the entire Arabic world” (59), or positing that the lack of empirical data limits our understanding of the psychological effects of timbre (173). Still, it is hard for the reader not to wonder about Pieslak’s recurrent complaints about his lack of access to the combat arena in Iraq and to related resources and how that hindered his research (6–7, 57, 87–88, 124, 183): why publish a monograph if the author feels his research is so limited at the time of writing?

The reader will find in Sound Targets a wealth of historical information about musical traditions and practices in the armed forces, assembled for the first time in one volume (usually at the beginning of chapters). Moreover, the book carefully explains music’s role within and relationship to military culture, from television recruiting, through basic combat training (BCT), to the battlefield. That recruits are not allowed any music other than for drills during BCT will undoubtedly surprise the reader, as will the soldiers...