An IASH Work-in-Progress seminar, delivered by Dr Morag J. Grant (Sabbatical Fellow, 2026)
The Musical Art of War
The working title of my book-in-progress, which I’m discussing in this session, suggests that the oft-theorised art of war may be, in significant ways, a musical art. ‘Musical’ here is meant in a broad sense to mean various forms of musical, proto-musical and paramusical practices with tactical, political, symbolic and emotional functions in warfare. The book began life as an attempt to understand these ancient and deeply meaningful connections between music and war, and to ask what a specifically musicological lens can tell us about the phenomenon of war itself. Fundamental to my underlying methodology is a framework that centres the experience of violence in war. As the book has developed, several elemental themes have emerged from this: in particular, the importance of ritual, and how this responds to the essentially traumatic nature of war.
In this talk, I will focus on the book’s penultimate (?) chapter, which I am currently writing and which explores the role of music in telling the story of war. The figure of the “bard” plays a central role here, as a kind of ideal type of such musical storytellers. Such poet-singers are met again and again in the history of martial cultures across Eurasia and Africa, from antiquity through to the present day. Despite differences in the cultural specifics, we can identify certain basic, recurrent responsibilities associated with them: chronicling events; paying tribute and passing judgement; and more generally, performing narratives of a society’s history, tradition and values. Thus, they also play a central role in the making and remaking of nations, meaning that this topic is particularly relevant for IASH’s current theme.
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/37531155471989?p=8WWYIkFmRuhkJa7R2Q
Meeting ID: 375 311 554 719 89
Passcode: 6SH9W885