Dating back to the 7th century, the early Turkish military band (Mehter) exerted great influence on the subsequent development of European and American military music. The colorful exuberance of the Ottoman regiments, with their combinations of kettledrums, cymbals, trumpets and bells, and riding upon Arabian stallions might come to act as an embodiment of the sheer force of a musical action: to mediate the chaotic energies of military force and provide a coherent, and no less threatening, image of its ordering. Marching music might be heard as a music designed to both stimulate nationalist courage as well as to harness the dynamic spirit of military might - that is, to give thrust to the agitations of collective force while disciplining its necessary aggressiveness. Marching music then might articulate a fundamental base of musical expression overall, that of stimulating a radical emotional and physical response while reassuring the listening subject of the possibility of its organization. Musical pleasure is thus based on witnessing or experiencing the coupling of creation and destruction, harmony and noise, conflict and resolve within a single expression - with military music, such intensities are made bluntly clear as they play out within the barbarous field of war, placing music firmly within the historical repertoire of violence.
As Attali has proposed, music is a simulacrum of murder - it performs a symbolic cut onto the social order by always already introducing noise into the structures of language; it provides a ritual space for the enactment of various disordering movements and sensations, from the ecstatic motion of dance to the sonic identification with heroic sentiment or certain role playing and its reversal. Music opens a space for the inclusion of psychic energies that de-sublimate and re-sublimate at one and the same time the vocabulary of social possibility, thereby becoming an instrument of power. Yet, following military music, I might add that music does not do this only through the introduction of noise (what Attali calls "the channelization of noise") - that is, through dissonant or disharmonious elements, but also, already within the form of music: the reassuring familiarity of even the oldest tune serves to potentially revitalize or charge psychic identification and uncover buried passions. Even hearing "I Will Survive" while walking through the Alexa mall in Berlin the other day pushes an extra beat into my step as I stroll through the shining corridors - thus already music grants dynamic exhilaration always on the edge of embodied aggression, an experience that glides along the line between unabashed fervor and its total ordering. The recent ruling in Jamaica to ban the broadcast of any form of music that makes explicit reference to sexual acts or promotes gun violence, rape, etc., both reveals the inherent intensity music performs while inadvertently undoing the fundamental offering music makes: banning music is like taking the sugar out of lollipops, it rids the beauty of the form of all its subliminal meaning. The Jamaican ruling finds curious parallel in Brighton, with the Green party calling for an earlier ban on "homophobic reggae music" from its pubs, which they say leads to a steady wave of violence against gay Jamaicans.
Uniting music and the military uncovers a deeper history then, which interweaves psycho-sonic understanding with national campaigns, sublimating the beating of an enemy onto the beat of the drum. I might suggest that in the hearing of any drum we can find the Ottoman kettledrum still resounding.
