Morale as sonic force: Listen to Britain and total war

ABSTRACT

Scholars have tended to imagine the sounds of war as those of violence, and wartime listening as an “act of survival,” often privileging the battlefield over everyday wartime life, and the experiences of men over those of women and children. Such tendencies are challenged in multiple ways by the Second World War as an instance of “total war,” and by the experiences of the British “home front” in particular. Even in this context, tellingly, contemporary representations of the sounds of war tended to focus on violence. However, an intriguingly expansive treatment of the sounds of war can be found in the 1942 documentary film Listen to Britain, a collage of music and everyday sound. The film alights on sound as a figure of the affective force of morale itself, binding and integrating while also remaining difficult to pin down and control. At the same time, it grounds music in a transformed sense of the power of sound under the conditions of total war, attempting to imagine afresh music’s relationship to feeling and the political.

KEYWORDS:

• Radio
• World War Two
• film
• Britain
• documentary

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the Special Collections staff at the British Film Institute Reubens Library, and am grateful for helpful feedback from the peer-reviewers for this journal and participants in Sonic Circulations (King’s College London, June 2019).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Examples of scholarship highlighted by Sykes include Daughtry 2014, 2015 and Goodman 2012. On related debates about “ontologies” of sound, prompted in part by Goodman’s work, see Kane 2015.

2. On a more expansive sense of “wartime” sound, see especially Williams 2019, xxx-xxxi. Sykes makes a related point about the limited definitions of wartime violence in Sykes 2018, 36.

3. Patrick Deer has used the term “war culture” to refer to the expanded space of this war (especially its mobilisation of literature and the arts), and to how artists and writers struggled to both represent it and manage their own participation (Deer 2009, 408).

4. This document appears to be a draft of the core information for the film’s publicity. The published advertising uses the blurb “The music of a people at war” instead (Listen to Britain Press Books).

5. Starting in April 1941, women had to be registered for war-related employment, although employment itself was still voluntary. In December 1941, conscription took effect for single women aged 20–30  (Rose 2003, 109).

6. The film might be seen to draw on what Goodman calls the “attractive” (vs the “repulsive”) “power of sonic force.” He writes, “On the other side, we have a tactical deployment whose objective is that of intensification, the heightening of collective sensation, an attractive, almost magnetic, or vertical force, a force that sucks bodies in toward its source … In this instance, the aim of mobilizing bodies extensively is accompanied and perhaps overridden by the primary objective of the intensive mobilization of affect” (Goodman 2012, 11).

7. For a summary of some related debates within musicology and sound studies (including those surrounding the gnostic/drastic divide proposed in Abbate 2004) in relation to wartime sound, see especially Daughtry 2014, 30–32.

8. On the MoI’s preference for either straightforward exhortation or, increasingly after 1942, factual information, see Chapman 1998, 107–108. The Crown Film Unit was formerly the General Post Office film unit, which came under the auspices of the MoI at the start of the war. The MoI used both it and commercial studios to produce its documentaries, as well as sponsoring feature films made by commercial studios.

9. The MoI started off producing 5-minute shorts, with theatres agreeing to set aside 5-minute slots before features, later moving to 15-minute films that would change monthly (Chapman 1998, 93–108). Listen to Britain began as a film in this 5-minute series, “National Gallery 1941,” discussed below. The shift to 15-minute films might help explain its expansion into a longer film, although the new policy didn’t technically take effect until after it was made.

10. Examples include “Tatler,” Manchester Evening News, 7 July 1942, 2; Sevenoaks Chronicle and Kentish Advertiser, 17 July 1942, 2; Stirling Observer, 25 August 1942, 6. Listen to Britain was distributed commercially by British Lion, which created its own set of publicity materials for the film, featuring the tag “The music of a people at war … the sound of life in Britain, by night and by day,” and casting it as “a worthy box-office successor to ‘Target For To-night’ and ‘Ferry Pilot,’” both more informational documentaries about military efforts (Listen to Britain Press Books).

11. For instance, Listen to Britain was shown within a free weekly series of films presented by the MoI in Bristol in summer 1942, in connection with an effort to encourage people to stay home for their holidays (“‘Stay-at-Home’ Film Shows,” Western Daily Press, 25 July 1942, 4).

12. Listen to Britain was distributed in the US by the American Office of War Information, having been refused by all American theatrical distributors (“Britain’s Film Role in America,” Documentary News Letter, February 1943, 173). The MoI categorised films as “O” (“sent overseas”), “O.O” (“primarily for overseas use”), or “O.O.O.” (“exclusively for overseas use”); Listen to Britain was categorised as “O” (Documentary News Letter, May 1942, 74).

13. Harrisson is referring to surveys by Mass Observation, an organisation he co-founded with Jennings.

14. This is to draw on an established understanding of emotion vs. affect, seen, for instance, in Goodman 2012, xiv. However, the opposition between affect and emotion has also been extensively problematized. Rei Terada describes how “emotion appears inseparable from expression and subjectivity” (emphasis added), while seeking ultimately to debunk that link, arguing that emotion too could be seen as subjectless (2001, 6). On the “affect/emotion split” and its limits, see also Ngai 2005, 25–27. A number of critics, like Ngai, use “feeling” as a more expansive term than either emotion or affect. Ben Highmore, discussed earlier, similarly finds “mood” and “feeling” more effective terms for describing the collective and non-subjective experience of emotion (2017, 14, 45–47).

15. Mansell states, “In keeping with his earlier film on everyday working life, Spare Time (1939), Jennings carefully separated noise and music on the sound track of Listen to Britain” (2017, 179). While this is true of Spare Time, a film that includes very little industrial noise – its disruptive appearance at the very end of the film marks the end of the leisure the film documents – Listen to Britain is very different, most obviously in its abundant inclusion of industrial and transport noise, but also in how that noise is treated.

16. On this point, also see Hunter 2010, 74, 77–78.

17. Jennings was recording the music for his film Words for Battle. The Queen’s Hall itself was destroyed in an air raid shortly afterwards, in May 1941. See Stansky and Abrahams 1994, 96–97.

18. Kent Puckett makes a similar point about montage in Jennings’ films as a way to preserve a sense of “democratic particularity,” in a context where “the British were forced to find ways to preserve ideologically the little or the particular or the eccentric as a civilizational value while also accepting the large, totalizing terms of total mobilization”  (2017, 13).

19. On some of these acoustic effects, see Guynn’s extensive analysis in 1990, 69–148, especially his discussion of “acoustic matches,” which includes both the type of reflection effects mentioned here and two other effects: misapprehension-correction and acoustic dissolves (120, 147).

20. In this sense, the film reflects Mladen Dolar’s proposition that “there is no such thing as disacousmatization,” not only in the case of the voice, but here because there is a suggestion of an ultimate animating source of sound that cannot be seen. See Dolar 2006, 70.

21. On sonic plenitude and disjunction in the film, also see Beattie 2010, 74; Guynn 1990, 93, 103.

22. The programme had been recently instituted to help increase productivity, especially among the new female work force  (Baade 2012, 12, 60–81).

23. Jennings’ notes for this project are published in Jackson 1993, 118–156; Also see Jackson 2004, 339.

24. This was not always Jennings’ original intention. Instead of “Home on the Range,” the “Music of War” treatment (Humphrey Jennings Collection) had called for a less commercialised folksong, “She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain,” and while “Beer-Barrel Polka” fits the treatment’s description of a “hotted up version of an old dance,” it had suggested a song with older British roots (“Loch Lomond” or the George Grossmith song “See me dance the polka”).

25. On this diversity, see especially Webster 2018; Webster 2005.

26. Rosen identifies this as a performance for a BBC show called Workers’ Playtime, which broadcast lunchtime concerts from factories around Britain starting in May 1941 (2009, 401).

27. Queen Elizabeth (the Queen Mother) attended to mark Hess’s recent award of a MBE, and Hess invited Jennings to film on that day, offering to play the Mozart concerto he had requested (Hodgkinson and Sheratsky 1982, 59).

28. On other aspects of this parallel, also see Guynn 1990, 124.

29. These shots bear a close resemblance to ones called for in the “National Gallery 1941” rough shooting script, including “Polish Flyer standing against reproduction of Gainsborough’s Artist’s Daughters” (the painting seen in Listen to Britain is Gainsborough’s “The Painter’s Daughters Chasing a Butterfly”). The Gallery sequence in Listen to Britain also resembles other details in this shooting script, which calls for shots of a “pair of ambulance drivers in uniform (girls from Station 76)” in the audience, as well as “a young girl music student, who is following with a score, a woman air-raid warden and an old man listening by himself with his hand over his eyes,” suggesting that much of the sequence was staged (Jackson 1993, 24–25).

30. On the Dorchester, see Sweet 2011, 89–91. The Dorchester was also a centre of Zionist activity (Sweet 2011, 93–94), in which Cohen participated after visiting Palestine in 1939.

31. Jennings and his collaborators originally considered using a Bach Brandenburg Concerto, but settled on Mozart, on the basis that it was more “human” by one account (Rosen 2009, 403–404).

32. On this “matching” effect, see Guynn 1990, 120, 147.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust.

Notes on contributors

Heather Wiebe

Heather Wiebe is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Music at King’s College London. She is the author of Britten’s Unquiet Pasts: Sound and Memory in Postwar Reconstruction (Cambridge, 2012), and guest-editor of a special issue of The Opera Quarterly on “opera and obsolescence.” She was awarded a Leverhulme Research Fellowship for her project “Mobilizing Music in Wartime British Film.”