Commemorating Gallipoli through Music

Commemorating Gallipoli through Music
Author: John Morgan O'Connell
Publisher: Lexington Books
Total Pages: 333
Release: 2017-12-01
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498556213

This monograph examines the relationship between music and memory as it relates to the Gallipoli Campaign (1915-6). Drawing upon a wide variety of sources in many languages, it explores the multiple ways in which music is employed to remember and to forget, to celebrate and to commemorate a victory (on the part of the Central Powers) and a defeat (on the part of the Allied forces) in the Dardanelles during the First World War (1914-8). Further, it argues that commemoration itself can be viewed as an ‘instrument of war’. In particular, it investigates the complex positionality of individual actors during the centennial commemorations of the Gallipoli landings (24 April, 2015) where the Australians and the Turks most notably have employed music to reimagine the past, both nationalities invoking the ‘Gallipoli spirit’ (tr. ‘Çanakkale ruhu’) to advance a nationalist agenda and a resurgent militarism through the selective memorialization of an imperial past. The book interrogates through music the ambivalent position of minorities. With specific reference to the Irish (amongst the British) and the Armenians (amongst the Ottomans), it shows how song might serve both to articulate a nationalist defiance and an imperialist consensus during a tumultuous period of irredentism. By uncovering the complex pathways of musical transmission, it demonstrates through musical analysis how the colonized could become the colonizer (in the case of the Irish) or a minority might conform to a majority (in the case of the Armenians). Further, the publication looks at the uneasy alliance between the Turks and the Germans. It focuses on a German musician (as an imperial bandmaster) and Germanic entrepreneurs (in the recording industry) who entertained or who served the German Mission in Istanbul. Here, it considers by way of musical composition the shared wish on the part of the Germans and the Turks to create a Lebensraum in Asia.

Singing, Soldiering, and Sheet Music in America during the First World War

Singing, Soldiering, and Sheet Music in America during the First World War
Author: Christina Gier
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2016-10-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1498516017

An advertisement in the sheet music of the song “Goodbye Broadway, Hello France” (1917) announces: “Music will help win the war!” This ad hits upon an American sentiment expressed not just in advertising, but heard from other sectors of society during the American engagement in the First World War. It was an idea both imagined and practiced, from military culture to sheet music writers, about the power of music to help create a strong military and national community in the face of the conflict; it appears straightforward. Nevertheless, the published sheet music, in addition to discourse about gender, soldiering and music, evince a more complex picture of society. This book presents a study of sheet music and military singing practices in America during the First World War that critically situates them in the social discourses, including issues of segregation and suffrage, and the historical context of the war. The transfer of musical styles between the civilian and military realm was fluid because so many men were enlisted from homes with the sheet music while they were also singing songs in their military training. Close musical analysis brings the meaningful musical and lyrical expressions of this time period to the forefront of our understanding of soldier and civilian music making at this time.

Remapping the Future

Remapping the Future
Author: Deb N. Bandyopadhyay
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 195
Release: 2014-03-17
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1443858080

The first decade of the twenty-first century has seen an increasing trend in the field of Australian Studies for scholars to situate their research within a broader international context and conversation. In some cases, this involves exploring how concepts developed in other national contexts can be employed to illuminate aspects of the Australian experience; in others, the focus is on the transnational movement of people and ideas between Australia and the rest of the world. This collection of essays represents a selection of this recent scholarship, particularly in relation to conversations between scholars in Australia and India, and was initiated under the auspices of the Indian Association for the Study of Australia (Eastern Region). The essays are drawn from a variety of disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives – history, literature, film, education, sociology and politics, cultural studies and environmental studies. The papers collected in the volume are selections from the conference proceedings of an international conference on “Re-mapping the Future: History, Culture and Environment in Australia and India”. This volume particularly explores various intersections of history, culture and environment in the discourse of cross-cultural linkages between Australia and India. It builds on the commonality of cultural networks, the intercolonial history of encounter and exchange, and the Indian diasporic presence in Australia, and looks forward to a future in terms of a developing bilateral relationship between Australia and India.

Performing Commemoration

Performing Commemoration
Author: Annegret Fauser
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2020-10-07
Genre: Music
ISBN: 047205466X

Public commemorations of various kinds are an important part of how groups large and small acknowledge and process injustices and tragic events. Performing Commemoration: Musical Reenactment and the Politics of Trauma looks at the roles music can play in public commemorations of traumatic events that range from the Armenian genocide and World War I to contemporary violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and the #sayhername protests. Whose version of a traumatic historical event gets told is always a complicated question, and music adds further layers to this complexity, particularly music without words. The three sections of this collection look at different facets of musical commemorations and reenactments, focusing on how music can mediate, but also intensify responses to social injustice; how reenactments and their use of music are shifting (and not always toward greater social effectiveness); and how claims for musical authenticity are politicized in various ways. By engaging with critical theory around memory studies and performance studies, the contributors to this volume explore social justice, in, and through music.

Commemorative Spaces of the First World War

Commemorative Spaces of the First World War
Author: James Wallis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2017-07-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1317309243

This is the first book to bring together an interdisciplinary, theoretically engaged and global perspective on the First World War through the lens of historical and cultural geography. Reflecting the centennial interest in the conflict, the collection explores the relationships between warfare and space, and pays particular attention to how commemoration is connected to spatial elements of national identity, and processes of heritage and belonging. Venturing beyond military history and memory studies, contributors explore conceptual contributions of geography to analyse the First World War, as well as reflecting upon the imperative for an academic discussion on the War’s centenary. This book explores the War’s impact in more unexpected theatres, blurring the boundary between home and fighting fronts, investigating the experiences of the war amongst civilians and often overlooked combatants. It also critically examines the politics of hindsight in the post-war period, and offers an historical geographical account of how the First World War has been memorialised within ‘official’ spaces, in addition to those overlooked and often undervalued ‘alternative spaces’ of commemoration. This innovative and timely text will be key reading for students and scholars of the First World War, and more broadly in historical and cultural geography, social and cultural history, European history, Heritage Studies, military history and memory studies.

Gallipoli to the Somme

Gallipoli to the Somme
Author: Alexander Aitken
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2018-04-12
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1775589781

Alexander Aitken was an ordinary soldier with an extraordinary mind. The student who enlisted in 1915 was a mathematical genius who could multiply nine-digit numbers in his head. He took a violin with him to Gallipoli (where field telephone wire substituted for an E-string) and practiced Bach on the Western Front. Aitken also loved poetry and knew the Aeneid and Paradise Lost by heart. His powers of memory were dazzling. When a vital roll-book was lost with the dead, he was able to dictate the full name, regimental number, next of kin and address of next of kin for every member of his former platoon—a total of fifty-six men. Everything he saw, he could remember. Aitken began to write about his experiences in 1917 as a wounded out-patient in Dunedin Hospital. Every few years, when the war trauma caught up with him, he revisited the manuscript, which was eventually published as Gallipoli to the Somme in 1963. Aitken writes with a unique combination of restraint, subtlety, and an almost photographic vividness. He was elected fellow of the Royal Society of Literature on the strength of this single work—a book recognised by its first reviewers as a literary memoir of the Great War to put alongside those by Graves, Blunden and Sassoon. Long out of print, this is by some distance the most perceptive memoir of the First World War by a New Zealand soldier. For this edition, Alex Calder has written a new introduction, annotated the text, compiled a selection of images, and added a commemorative index identifying the soldiers with whom Aitken served.

Gallipoli

Gallipoli
Author: Jenny Macleod
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2015-07-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 0191035238

The British-led Mediterranean Expeditionary Force that attacked the Ottoman Empire at Gallipoli in 1915 was a multi-national affair, including Australian, New Zealand, Irish, French, and Indian soldiers. Ultimately a failure, the campaign ended with the withdrawal of the Allied forces after less than nine months and the unexpected victory of the Ottoman armies and their German allies. In Britain, the campaign led to the removal of Churchill from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty and the abandonment of the plan to attack Germany via its 'soft underbelly' in the East. Thereafter, it was largely forgotten on a national level, commemorated only in specific localities linked to the campaign. In post-war Turkey, by contrast, the memory of Gallipoli played an important role in the formation of a Turkish national identity, celebrating both the ordinary soldier and the genius of the republic's first president, Mustafa Kemal. The campaign served a similarly important formative role in both Australia and New Zealand, where it is commemorated annually on Anzac Day. For the southern Irish, meanwhile, the bitter memory of service for the King in a botched campaign was forgotten for decades. Shaped initially by the imperatives of war-time, and the needs of the grief-stricken and the bereft, the memory of Gallipoli has been re-made time and again over the last century. For the Turks an inspirational victory, for many on the Allied side a glorious and romantic defeat, for others still an episode best forgotten, 'Gallipoli' has meant different things to different people, serving by turns as an occasion of sincere and heartfelt sorrow, an opportunity for separatist and feminist protest, and a formative influence in the forging of national identities.

Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary

Commemorating Race and Empire in the First World War Centenary
Author: Ben Wellings
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
Total Pages: 200
Release: 2018-09-27
Genre: History
ISBN: 1786948486

The ‘Great War for Civilisation’ was more than a European conflict. It was a global war spanning Asia, Africa and beyond. Drawing on original archival research in several languages and employing multidisciplinary frames of analysis, this innovative volume explores how race and empire were commemorated during the First World War Centenary.

Performing History

Performing History
Author: Nancy November
Publisher: Academic Studies PRess
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Music
ISBN: 1644694468

The fifteen essays of Performing History glimpse the diverse ways music historians “do” history, and the diverse ways in which music histories matter. This book’s chapters are structured into six key areas: historically informed performance; ethnomusicological perspectives; particular musical works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” war histories; operatic works that works that “tell,” “enact,” or “perform” power or enlightenment; musical works that deploy the body and a broad range of senses to convey histories; and histories involving popular music and performance. Diverse lines of evidence and manifold methodologies are represented here, ranging from traditional historical archival research to interviewing, performing, and composing. The modes of analyzing music and its associated texts represented here are as various as the kinds of evidence explored, including, for example, reading historical accounts against other contextual backdrops, and reading “between the lines” to access other voices than those provided by mainstream interpretation or traditional musicology.

Eric Bogle, Music and the Great War

Eric Bogle, Music and the Great War
Author: Michael J. K. Walsh
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 180
Release: 2018-01-02
Genre: History
ISBN: 1351764489

Eric Bogle has written many iconic songs that deal with the futility and waste of war. Two of these in particular, ‘And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘No Man’s Land (a.k.a. The Green Fields of France)’, have been recorded numerous times in a dozen or more languages indicating the universality and power of their simple message. Bogle’s other compositions about the First World War give a voice to the voiceless, prominence to the forgotten and personality to the anonymous as they interrogate the human experience, celebrate its spirit and empathise with its suffering. This book examines Eric Bogle’s songs about the Great War within the geographies and socio-cultural contexts in which they were written and consumed. From Anzac Day in Australia and Turkey to the ‘The Troubles’ in Northern Ireland and from small Aboriginal communities in the Coorong to the influence of prime ministers and rock stars on a world stage, we are urged to contemplate the nature and importance of popular culture in shaping contemporary notions of history and national identity. It is entirely appropriate that we do so through the words of an artist who Melody Maker described as ‘the most important songwriter of our time’.