Awards

• Winner of Winner of the RMA/Cambridge University Press Outstanding Edited Collection Book Prize for 2020.

Overview

What does sound, whether preserved or lost, tell us about nineteenth-century wartime? Hearing the Crimean War: Wartime Sound and the Unmaking of Sense pursues this question through the many territories affected by the Crimean War, including Britain, France, Turkey, Russia, Italy, Poland, Latvia, Dagestan, Chechnya, and Crimea. Examining the experience of listeners and the politics of archiving sound, it reveals the close interplay between nineteenth-century geographies of empire and the media through which wartime sounds became audible--or failed to do so. The volume explores the dynamics of sound both in violent encounters on the battlefield and in the experience of listeners far-removed from theaters of war, each essay interrogating the Crimean War's sonic archive in order to address a broad set of issues in musicology, ethnomusicology, literary studies, the history of the senses and sound studies.

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9780190916756

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Reviews

Recommended. -- J.E. Druesedow Jr., CHOICE Hearing the Crimean War offers a crucial contribution not only to historical sound studies, but also to scholarly discourse on sound and affect in wartime. With essays that address the many forms of media in which sound and sense came to be inscribed during the Crimean War-from literature, legal texts, and news articles to opera, popular song, and silence- this book and its authors provide a profoundly interdisciplinary account, impressive it in its historical and methodological scope, of how this global conflict was understood and remembered by those who lived through it. --Dr. Jillian Rogers, Lecturer in Musicology, University College Cork This relentlessly brilliant volume, bringing together sound studies scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, literary scholars and cultural historians, will provoke lively, and timely, discussion of musicology's 'sonic turn'. The various soundscapes of the Crimean War take shape - and melt back into air - in these pages, both on and far beyond the battlefield. Williams' chief contention is that the global moment signaled and shaped by the Crimea conflict anticipates and complicates our understanding of those of the present day. This volume will continue to raise questions about them long into the future. --Martin Stokes, King Edward Professor of Music, King's College London

Hearing the Crimean War offers a crucial contribution not only to historical sound studies, but also to scholarly discourse on sound and affect in wartime. With essays that address the many forms of media in which sound and sense came to be inscribed during the Crimean War-from literature, legal texts, and news articles to opera, popular song, and silence- this book and its authors provide a profoundly interdisciplinary account, impressive it in its historical and methodological scope, of how this global conflict was understood and remembered by those who lived through it. --Dr. Jillian Rogers, Lecturer in Musicology, University College Cork This relentlessly brilliant volume, bringing together sound studies scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, literary scholars and cultural historians, will provoke lively, and timely, discussion of musicology's 'sonic turn'. The various soundscapes of the Crimean War take shape - and melt back into air - in these pages, both on and far beyond the battlefield. Williams' chief contention is that the global moment signaled and shaped by the Crimea conflict anticipates and complicates our understanding of those of the present day. This volume will continue to raise questions about them long into the future. --Martin Stokes, King Edward Professor of Music, King's College London

This relentlessly brilliant volume, bringing together sound studies scholars, musicologists, ethnomusicologists, literary scholars and cultural historians, will provoke lively, and timely, discussion of musicology's 'sonic turn'. The various soundscapes of the Crimean War take shape - and melt back into air - in these pages, both on and far beyond the battlefield. Williams' chief contention is that the global moment signaled and shaped by the Crimea conflict anticipates and complicates our understanding of those of the present day. This volume will continue to raise questions about them long into the future. * Martin Stokes, King Edward Professor of Music, King's College London * Hearing the Crimean War offers a crucial contribution not only to historical sound studies, but also to scholarly discourse on sound and affect in wartime. With essays that address the many forms of media in which sound and sense came to be inscribed during the Crimean War-from literature, legal texts, and news articles to opera, popular song, and silence- this book and its authors provide a profoundly interdisciplinary account, impressive it in its historical and methodological scope, of how this global conflict was understood and remembered by those who lived through it. * Dr. Jillian Rogers, Lecturer in Musicology, University College Cork *

Author Information

Gavin Williams is a musicologist and Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow at King's College London. He wrote a PhD dissertation at Harvard University on sound and media in Milan ca. 1900, and was then a postdoctoral fellow at Jesus College, Cambridge. He has published articles and book chapters on Futurist music, Italian opera and ballet, and soundscapes in nineteenth-century London, and is currently writing a book on the imperial geographies of recorded sound during the first half of the twentieth century.

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