On Music, Torture and Detention: Reflections on Issues of Research and Discipline

This article explores the late engagement of music research with the long-standing yet overlooked association between music, violence and terror. Musicology and ethnomusicology have been historically and ideologically founded on the notion of music as an inherently positive, benign and ennobling artform. As such, these fields took long to engage with music’s long-standing association with violence, war and power, dating back to the Middle Ages if not earlier; the study of Nazi concentration and extermination camps is a notable exception, although it was also examined relatively belatedly. Left unexplored by historians, social anthropologists, human rights scholars, and legal experts working in the field of violence, detention and justice, this gap began to be critically addressed in music research only in the last decades. In mapping this new field, the article explores this latent reaction as a disciplinary trauma, critically discussing a wide range of effects stemming from this silencing. Also examined is music’s integral role in new technologies of terror emerging during the Cold War, the cultural biases that have turned it into an elusive means of torture, and the effects stemming from the overshadowing of its damaging potential. The article also discusses the practice of music torture, its impact and the legal context that has made it possible. Addressing the intersections of music and terror, it underlines the need for more nuanced soundscapes of detention that explore the entanglement of negative and positive uses of music as they are imposed from above and reclaimed from below. The article was published in a special issue of the journal "Transposition. Musique et sciences sociales", titled "Sound, Music and Violence" edited by Luis Velasco-Pufleau. The entire issue can be accessed here: https://journals.openedition.org/transposition/5289The article draws on findings and results of my Marie Skłodowska Curie Individual Fellowship (acronym MUSDEWAR 706016), conducted at Panteion University, Athens, from 1 December 2017 to 30 November 2019