Whether it’s heavy metal or pop, doesn’t really matter: Tore Tvarnø Lind, music anthropologist at the University of Copenhagen, researches the methods of “modern” music torture. His work shows how, through structural violence and cruelty, music’s intended purpose is perverted and employed for human torture. An excerpt from his contribution to the newly published book “Krieg singen”. To article...

From radio propaganda in Rwanda to torture in Guantanamo Bay, bloodshed accompanied by a soundtrack of reggae during the civil war in Sierra Leone to the calls to battle of the Marseillaise: What does music have to do with war? The cultural anthropologist Angela Dreßler explores this question, and in the process discovers how music is supposed to put fears of another military putsch to rest in war-torn Guinea-Bissau. To article in German...

The connections between war and music are as diverse as they are many. One hundred years after the First World War, the festival program of Singing the War looks at the manifestations of these relationships since then, from technologies developed for use in war that would later take on a central role in music (radio, the loudspeaker, recording, etc.) to music as war propaganda, as a form of resistance, as a means of processing, etc. Singing the War draws an arc over the century to draw attention to just how close war is to Europe today. A Discussion with Bernd Scherer and the curators of the festival Detlef Diederichsen and Holger Schulze. To article...