Research seminars

Erin Johnson-Williams | ‘The Concertina’s Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Boer War Suffering

Event Details

Speaker: Erin Johnson-Williams (University of Durham)

Date: 21 October 2020

Time: 4.15-5.45 pm

Online (Zoom)

Abstract

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina’s Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalised, ‘all’s fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the Second Boer War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as noted by van Heyningen (2010), food in Boer War concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the Second Boer War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.  

Biography 

Erin Johnson-Williams is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Music at Durham University. Her research focuses on decolonisation, the imperial legacies of music education, trauma studies, gender and maternity, and soundscapes of colonial violence. Erin’s current Leverhulme project, entitled ‘Audible Incarceration: Singing Communal Religion in Colonial Concentration Camps’, examines the role of singing, religious experience and trauma in spaces of colonial incarceration, with particular focus on the concentration camps of the Boer War in South Africa.

 

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Oct 21 2020 -

Erin Johnson-Williams | ‘The Concertina’s Deadly Work in the Trenches’: Soundscapes of Boer War Suffering

Erin Johnson-Wlliams discusses the role of music in Boer War concentration camps.

Online