Acoustic Coercion: Music, Violence, and Nationalist Conflict

Abstract This research note proposes a conceptual and methodological framework for studying the relationship between music and nationalist conflict. Conceptually, it introduces acoustic coercion — the enforcement of sonic conformity through informal violence operating with state complicity under credible impunity through selective non-intervention — as a consolidating concept for dynamics documented piecemeal across existing scholarship on music-politics relations. This concept captures dynamics that frameworks often organized around propaganda, censorship, and resistance capture partially: the gap between formal tolerance and informal terror, the conscription of performers into political service, and the impossibility of acoustic neutrality in polarized environments. Methodologically, the note demonstrates how historical acoustemology — the reconstruction of past sonic environments from textual sources — can serve nationalism studies by recovering the lived experience of sonic conflict from archival materials while remaining attentive to listening positionality. The toolkit applies equally to ethnographic study of contemporary cases; the historical emphasis reflects the available evidence. Drawing on original research into the partisan press in Athens during the Greek National Schism (1915–1922), the note shows how professional musicians became trapped subjects, compelled to perform partisan repertoires through violence and economic necessity. The note concludes by suggesting how these tools might illuminate other cases where sound serves as a medium of nationalist boundary enforcement.