Music, Propaganda, Recruitment and the Press: Manchester’s Military Bands during the First World War

Abstract

This article aims to find a way through the propaganda surrounding the place of military music during the first world war, looking beyond the deliberate deployment of music as a recruiting tool to find traces of ‘the soul of a battalion’. It investigates the key responsibilities of military bands in and from the Manchester region during the first world war, as reported in the Manchester Guardian . It focuses on Manchester’s home-grown musicians and local bands, the ways they were drawn into the war effort and ultimately into conflict overseas. In doing so, it encounters important and often problematic questions about the perceived power of music in wartime, the purposes to which military bands were put, the actual lived experiences of musicians within such bands, and the evident tensions arising with regard to how musical interventions were described in print.