Based on first-person accounts of interrogators and former detainees as well as unclassified military documents, this article outlines the variety of ways that “loud music” has been used in the detention camps of the United States‘ “global war on terror.” A survey of practices at Bagram Air Force Base, Afghanistan; Camp Nama (Baghdad), Iraq; Forward Operating Base Tiger (Al-Qaim), Iraq; Mosul Air Force Base, Iraq; Guantánamo, Cuba; Camp Cropper (Baghdad), Iraq; and at the “dark prisons” from 2002 to 2006 reveals that the use of “loud music” was a standard, openly acknowledged component of “harsh interrogation.” Such music was understood to be one medium of the approach known as “futility” in both the 1992 and the 2006 editions of the US Army's field manual for interrogation. The purpose of such “futility” techniques as “loud music” and “gender coercion” is to persuade a detainee that resistance to interrogation is futile, yet the military establishment itself teaches techniques by which “the music program” can be resisted. The article concludes with the first-person account of a young US citizen, working in Baghdad as a contractor, who endured military detention and “the music program” for ninety-seven days in mid-2006—a man who knew how to resist.

This essay takes Paul Robeson's 1939 performances of Earl Robinson and John Latouche's popular cantata Ballad for Americans as a focal point to explore how Robeson's persona and sound as folksinger—a “people's artist”—and his political identity and struggles as a radical black intellectual interacted and collided with the cultural-racial politics of “people's music” and with Popular Front discourses on the folk. From its legendary CBS radio premiere in November 1939 throughout the war years, Robeson's voice critically mediated—and most powerfully articulated—not only the work's narrative of nation but also the diverse formal and stylistic sonic frames through which this narrative was sounded. The ideological conflict in Ballad for Americans between accommodation and protest, national affirmation and critique, the realities of racial and ethnic divides and the promise of national inclusiveness indexed troubling contradictions of race and nation. Yet the internationalist contexts of Robeson's work as a singer-activist during this period, in particular the performative black internationalism embodied in his concert programs, suggest other perspectives and interpretive frameworks for rehearing Ballad for Americans.

Among his instrumental music, Victor Herbert's Second Cello Concerto, op. 30 (1894) in particular deserves greater attention, not only because it has become standard repertoire but because of its historical importance as a stimulus to Antonín Dvořák. An analysis of the piece reveals a subtly crafted composition that brilliantly exploits the resources of the cello—Herbert's own instrument—and that builds upon the composer's earlier work for cello and orchestra. The work also exhibits that stylistic amalgam of Irish, German, and American elements that characterize Herbert's operetta scores. Scholars have long appreciated the fact that the piece helped inspire Dvořák to attempt a cello concerto of his own (1895). But Herbert, as has been suggested in the case of George W. Chadwick, might have influenced Dvořák's “American” music more generally. In turn, Dvořák's music—in particular, his “New World” Symphony—seems to have left its mark on Herbert's Second Concerto. In short, Herbert and Dvořák—colleagues at New York's National Conservatory in the early 1890s—engaged in a sort of musical dialogue, one that reflected differing ideas concerning nationalism and American music.