Morale as Sonic Force: Listen to Britain and Total War

TY - JOUR

T1 - Morale as Sonic Force

T2 - Listen to Britain and Total War

AU - Wiebe, Heather

N1 - Funding Information: This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust. I would like to thank the Special Collections staff at the British Film Institute Reubens Library, and am grateful for helpful feedback from the peer-reviewers for this journal and participants in Sonic Circulations (King?s College London, June 2019). Publisher Copyright: © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group. Copyright: Copyright 2021 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.

PY - 2021/2

Y1 - 2021/2

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - radio

KW - film

KW - music

KW - World War Two

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85110983556&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1080/20551940.2019.1649230

DO - 10.1080/20551940.2019.1649230

M3 - Article

SN - 2055-1940

VL - 7

SP - 24

EP - 41

JO - Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

JF - Sound Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal

IS - 1

ER -