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Instrument of War: Music and the Making of America's Soldiers
An original history of music and its consequences in the ranks of the US military.
Since the Civil War, the United States military has used music for everything from recruitment and training to signaling and mourning. “Reveille” has roused soldiers in the morning and “Taps” has marked the end of a long day. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and filled the seats at large-scale USO shows. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there was war, there was music too.
Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with the emotional and psychological traumas of war. Although musical practices have been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has rarely been recognized. Suisman also reveals a darker history of music, specifically how musical practices have enabled the waging of war. Instrument of War challenges assumptions that music is inherently a beneficent force in the world, demonstrating how deeply music has been entangled in large-scale state violence.
Whether it involves chanting “Sound off!” in basic training, turning on a radio, or listening to a playlist while out on patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers’ wartime experiences. Now we can finally hear it.
Since the Civil War, the United States military has used music for everything from recruitment and training to signaling and mourning. “Reveille” has roused soldiers in the morning and “Taps” has marked the end of a long day. Soldiers have sung while marching, listened to phonographs and armed forces radio, and filled the seats at large-scale USO shows. Whether the sounds came from brass instruments, weary and homesick singers, or a pair of heavily used earbuds, where there was war, there was music too.
Instrument of War is a first-of-its-kind study of music in the lives of American soldiers. Historian David Suisman traces how the US military used—and continues to use—music to train soldiers and regulate military life, and how soldiers themselves have turned to music to cope with the emotional and psychological traumas of war. Although musical practices have been part of war since time immemorial, the significance of the US military as a musical institution has rarely been recognized. Suisman also reveals a darker history of music, specifically how musical practices have enabled the waging of war. Instrument of War challenges assumptions that music is inherently a beneficent force in the world, demonstrating how deeply music has been entangled in large-scale state violence.
Whether it involves chanting “Sound off!” in basic training, turning on a radio, or listening to a playlist while out on patrol, the sound of music has long resonated in soldiers’ wartime experiences. Now we can finally hear it.
- GenresMusicAmerican History
336 pages, Hardcover
Published November 26, 2024
27 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
Did not finish
March 4, 2026No review cause I read the first 2 chapters for class and haven’t been able to finish. Interesting threads about power and agency when it comes to “musicking” in the military. I want more about insurgency though.
April 29, 2025
I discovered Instrument of War through a podcast interview with the author on Phantom Power, and I’m grateful I did. This book is one of the most compelling treatments of music’s entanglement with military life I’ve ever read. Suisman traces the arc of how music was embedded in the routines, identities, and emotional survival of soldiers from the Civil War through Iraq and the broader entanglements of the production of the music with the music/entertainment civilian industries
There’s a moment in the World War I chapter that will stay with me for life. Suisman describes how, even in the trenches, soldiers surrounded by the horrors of mechanized warfare would twice a day place a call to basecamp through a wired phone line stretched across miles. They would crowd around the receiver, straining to catch the thin, tinny sound of a live band playing back in basecamp. That image hit me hard. I see it as part of a deeper truth about music: our first connection to the world is sonic, not visual. In the womb, we are held by the rhythm of our mothers’ heartbeat and the melody of her voice. After birth, I believe everything, our culture, our politics, our art, even our violence, carries within it a longing to return to that original sonic embrace. These men, covered in mud, exposed to death, caught inside a world built by the logics of Enlightenment rationality and industrial capitalism, were reaching for that first connection - reaching toward the memory of that initial sonic embrace.
There’s a moment in the World War I chapter that will stay with me for life. Suisman describes how, even in the trenches, soldiers surrounded by the horrors of mechanized warfare would twice a day place a call to basecamp through a wired phone line stretched across miles. They would crowd around the receiver, straining to catch the thin, tinny sound of a live band playing back in basecamp. That image hit me hard. I see it as part of a deeper truth about music: our first connection to the world is sonic, not visual. In the womb, we are held by the rhythm of our mothers’ heartbeat and the melody of her voice. After birth, I believe everything, our culture, our politics, our art, even our violence, carries within it a longing to return to that original sonic embrace. These men, covered in mud, exposed to death, caught inside a world built by the logics of Enlightenment rationality and industrial capitalism, were reaching for that first connection - reaching toward the memory of that initial sonic embrace.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews