Morale as sonic force: Listen to Britain and total war

摘要

Scholars have tended to imagine the sounds of war as those of violence, and wartime listening as an "act of survival," often privileging the battlefield over everyday wartime life, and the experiences of men over those of women and children. Such tendencies are challenged in multiple ways by the Second World War as an instance of "total war," and by the experiences of the British "home front" in particular. Even in this context, tellingly, contemporary representations of the sounds of war tended to focus on violence. However, an intriguingly expansive treatment of the sounds of war can be found in the 1942 documentary film Listen to Britain, a collage of music and everyday sound. The film alights on sound as a figure of the affective force of morale itself, binding and integrating while also remaining difficult to pin down and control. At the same time, it grounds music in a transformed sense of the power of sound under the conditions of total war, attempting to imagine afresh music's relationship to feeling and the political.