Music and Conflict (review)

Music and Conflict is a valuable addition to the growing literature on music in war and peace. In addition to how music might dissolve difference and nurture cross-cultural understanding, the book considers the ways in which music inflames and justifies conflict. The volume brings together an array of case studies and engages conflict with a theoretical depth that fosters thought for exploring countless other disputes. All of the authors in this volume acknowledge the power of music to move people, yet, unlike countless other affirmations of music’s healing and peace-making capabilities, these writers realize that if music has power it also has power to harm. Three themes permeate the book and are found to varying degrees in each of the essays. The first provides insight into how the discourse and the use of music help to identify conflict. By examining the discord in music discourse and practice, the essays highlight policies and ideologies that inform musical production and meaning. Second is an account of some of the ways that music is employed to resolve conflict by fostering intercultural understanding to promoting healing. The third theme speaks to the applied researcher and suggests ways that ethnomusicologists might operate as mediators in conflict resolution.

John O’Connell’s introduction, “An Ethno musicological Approach to Music and Conflict,” is valuable for its careful presentation of the myriad of ways that this topic can be approached. In a Lakoffian manner he highlights that the language of music scholarship, analysis, and practice are heavily imbued with metaphors of conflict, and that war and peace are not discrete categories but best thought of as a continuum of behaviors. The book logically progresses from music used to exacerbate conflict to music used for resolution. Each of the six sections comprises a pair of chapters grouped together under specific conceptual and geopolitical themes. The editors should be commended for the organizational acumen that facilitates dialogue between the chapters. The work’s value emerges from the intersections between the paired articles. The clear, progressive layout lends itself well to dialogue between subsections and, as such, would work well in a seminar context.

Part 1, “Music and War,” contains two articles on post-Soviet Eastern Europe. Jane C. Sugarman’s “Kosova Calls for Peace” highlights how “wars require that communities overlook differences in background and orientation so as to act as a united group” and how Albanian songs and music videos produced during the Kosovo War “forged a sense of national purpose by eliding or mystifying social difference” (p. 18). Sugarman argues that this elision of differences was achieved through the evocation of a “mythic mode of representation” that may be identified in song lyrics, the staging of music videos, and “hyper-ethnic” musical arrangements. Inna Naroditskaya’s chapter “Musical Enactment of Conflict and Compromise in Azerbaijan” provides a close reading of the score and performance(s) of the oratorio Qarabag Shikestasi by Azeri composer Vasif Adigozal. She reads across this piece and several others to find a musical interpretation of the conflict over the contested region of Qarabag. Different types of hybridization are engaged strategically in these pieces to balance a proximity to Western music with a distance that keeps them attractively “exotic,” revealing a craving for communication with and recognition by other nations.

Part 2, “Music and Boundaries,” explores how music helps define difference within and across frontiers in Korea and Northern Ireland. Keith Howard’s “Music across the DMZ” examines how musical policy reflects the dominant ideology in each sector. Artists on both sides of the Korean demilitarized zone have advanced on different trajectories, each creating music of value. The assumption that true Korean music is maintained in South Korea and has been erased in North Korea is deeply problematic, Howard argues. Musicians in the two Koreas remain more closely connected than the DMZ might tempt us to believe. Howard imagines the role that music...