Investigations of how people have used music to represent, perform, enact and cope with trauma have proliferated in the last decade, although these have often focused on post-World War II musicians and musical phenomena. This work has engaged various methodologies and drawn on myriad bodies of trauma theory in order to better understand the relationships between music and trauma for Holocaust survivors, Cold War- and glasnost-era Eastern European musicians and civilians and soldiers in Iraq. However, despite the growing interest in trauma within music scholarship, scant attention has been paid to relationships between musical phenomena and trauma prior to World War II. And yet, the wars, revolutions, forced displacement, slavery and imperialism of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make these years some of the most violent in the histories of modern Europe and the Americas, and thus some of the most important to address when asking questions regarding relationships between music and trauma.

In this special issue's introductory essay, we consider why pre-twentieth century musicians and repertoires have historically not been addressed in scholarly literature. In so doing, we outline the aims of the issue; review relevant literature in musicology and trauma studies; discuss the benefits and challenges of applying trauma theory to nineteenth-century music and musicians and provide readers with information on this special issue's collaborative history. Although giving readers a fleshed-out overview of trauma studies from the nineteenth century to present is outside the scope of this article, this introduction nevertheless provides enough background on the status and main ideas of trauma research from the mid-nineteenth century to present day to facilitate comprehension of how the research showcased in this special issue relates to social, historical and political conceptions of trauma.

During the two years of the Mexican–American War (1846–48) and in its immediate aftermath, American composers and publishers produced numerous pieces on topics related to the conflict. Many of these were written for solo piano or voice with keyboard accompaniment and marketed as popular entertainment to amateur musicians performing in the home. This repertoire comprises lament songs, battle pieces and patriotic songs and dances. Works include musical depictions of violent and tragic scenes, but most pieces are in major keys, featuring lyrical melodies and upbeat dance rhythms – the typical fare of parlour music of the period.

This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

In the “terrible year” of 1870–71 – spanning the Franco-Prussian War through the Commune – Parisians looked on with horror at the nightmarish transformation of their Ville Lumière. They not only watched, they listened – garnering crucial information but also failing to shut out belliphonic sounds that rendered them sleepless, sick or even unable to function. In a flood of lectures and treatises, a generation of neurologists and psychiatrists assessed the impact of this year on French minds and bodies. Moreover, Charcot and Janet formulated early understandings of trauma amidst the cultural memories and traumatized populations impacted by 1870–71.

Weaving together contemporary medical discourse, journals, reportage and iconography, this article reveals a topography of Parisian sonic violence. Drawing on Mark M. Smith and Jennifer Stoever's work on how race, gender, and class structure listening, this case study analyses the positionality of sound's traumatic impacts on nineteenth-century Parisians. Connecting sound, the events of 1870–71, and early conceptions of trauma also critically integrates these decades with subsequent experiences of la grande guerre. As I ultimately situate a specifically urban theorization of the aural experiences of war, I conclude with how sonic trauma of l'année terrible might stretch far beyond 1870–71. Borrowing from Andreas Huyssen's concept of city as palimpsest – where visual reminders of violence leave ‘absent presences’ in the heart of an urban space – I query how sonic memories of conflict might similarly leave traces – sonic scars? – in both physical places and in individual and collective memories.

Under the recurring headline ‘the Concertina's Deadly Work in the Trenches’, several British newspapers reported in early 1900 that, during the ongoing siege of Mafeking, British army concertina players were capturing enemy soldiers by simply playing strains of the concertina to distract them out of their hiding places. ‘One is sorry to learn that the art of music should be pressed into service to lure persons to destruction’, a commentator in the Musical News noted, but then, it was rationalized, ‘all's fair in war’. This hybrid use of the concertina during the South African War was further employed as a metaphor for the decay of the physical body itself: as has been noted by Elizabeth van Heyningen, food in Boer concentration camps was so meagre that the meat served to prisoners was once described as coming from a ‘carcase [who] looks like a concertina drawn out fully with all the wind knocked out’. Likewise, Krebs (1999) has discussed the presence of the concertina in the trenches as an example of contemporaneous stereotypes about the susceptibility of Boer soldiers to music in relation to perceived notions that they were backwards and easily manipulated. Drawing upon references to music – particularly the ubiquitous, anthropomorphised, instrument of the concertina – in concentration camps during the South African War, this paper will situate the use of British military music at the dawn of the twentieth century within the framework of trauma studies, proposing that the soundscapes of imperial war were implicitly tinged with traces of physical suffering.

Military hospitals in Britain during the First World War cultivated a variety of activities that promoted healing for soldiers, of which music was central. This music was documented by soldiers in hospital-sponsored magazines such as The Hydra at Craiglockhart, an officers’ hospital in Edinburgh that specialized in treatment of shell shock. There, this article argues, music and sound were associated with a curative physicality and sensoriality, revealing the aural and tactile to be aligned within the ideology of the magazine and trauma therapies prescribed.

Music's role in trauma narratives in The Hydra reflects the two approaches to shell shock treatment at the hospital. First, reviews identified weekly musical entertainments, which included singing, playing instruments and listening, as part Captain Arthur Brock's ‘cure by functioning’ regime. Second, narratives in literary contents that reference music in depicting memory and dreams reflect the Freudian psychotherapy used by Dr W. H. R. Rivers, a narrativizing process that I connect to the concept of ‘testimony’ in trauma studies. While the two approaches and their use of music are tied to social class, in both – as I show in drawing upon theories of Jean-Martin Charcot, Pierre Janet and Bessel van der Kolk – music is therapeutic because it is visceral – its curative properties lie in its ability to ultimately move the body and mind. Finally, drawing upon theories of cultural trauma by Jeffrey Alexander, this article posits that these narratives evince a self-fashioning of this shell-shocked community that has over time (amplified by the legacies of the hospital's most famous patients, Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon) become central to the dominant British cultural memory of the war. This article establishes music's role in narratives about trauma in First World War Britain, illuminating music's place in testimonies about not only hospital life and community formation, but also alienation, trauma and recovery; memory and mourning; and sacrifice and resilience.

Upon hearing Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin in 1918 Jean Roger-Ducasse was disturbed by the incongruity between each movement's music and its dedication to a fallen soldier. Similarly, historians have noted the ‘strangeness’ of Frontispiece and La Valse, which Ravel wrote after his war service and his mother's death in 1917. When taken together, these instances of ‘strange’ music – written during an especially emotionally trying period of Ravel's life – lead to questions concerning relationships between Ravel's music and traumatic expression. Although Carolyn Abbate and Michael Puri have suggested that these pieces can be understood as expressions of loss, no one has yet attempted to address how they might illuminate Ravel's trauma within the context of conceptions of trauma in interwar France.

In this article I suggest that Ravel's Le Tombeau de Couperin, Frontispice and La Valse are musical performances of his traumatic responses to the war and his mother's death. I place primary and archival sources such as letters and diaries of Ravel and his peers in dialogue with early twentieth-century French sources in psychology and medicine to determine how Ravel understood trauma. Utilizing Abraham and Torok's theorizations of traumatic grief, I read Ravel's compositions as bearing ‘magic words’ – indirect articulations of trauma that manifest when individuals cannot openly voice their trauma. By studying these pieces in the context of modernist musical mourning traditions in World War I-era France, I suggest that Ravel's post-war compositions demonstrate his resistance to nationalistic norms requiring the suppression of trauma for the war effort.

The National Library of Spain (Biblioteca Nacional de España, BNE) is the head of the Spanish library system. It holds all books published in Spain, and also several collections of different types, including the Music and Audiovisuals Department's sound recordings and sheet music. Its Department of Bibliographic Control of Periodicals catalogues both newspapers and magazines. In addition, the BNE offers a number of online services including the Hispanic Digital Library (Biblioteca Digital Hispánica, BDH) and the Digital Newspaper Library (Hemeroteca Digital, HemD). The BDH, was created in 2008 and currently provides free and open access to more than 220,000 digitized documents, including recordings and scores.1 In contrast, HemD, which is part of the BDH, focuses on the public dissemination of the digital collection of Spanish historical presses.2 It currently offers around 2,500 titles and more than 70,000,000 pages.3 Newspapers and magazines are available in PDF format and searches are facilitated by OCR (Optical Character Recognition).