“I was sure it was a new song by Shlomi Shabat but it turned out to be a siren”: Civilian listening during wartime in Israel

‘To witness war is, in a large part, to hear it,’ asserts Martin Daughtry in his sonic ethnography of wartime Iraq (2015, 33). From warning sirens to loud booms in the sky; from tweaked radio playlists to the silence of a military funeral; from news reports relayed over the loudspeakers of buses to an unexpectedly catchy Hamas propaganda song: sound is central to the civilian experience of wartime in Israel. Wartime is characterized by vigilant listening to an altered everyday soundscape, and in turn, this soundscape and the embodied responses it demands reconfigure the relationship between civilians, the state, and those on the front lines of the conflict. Recent work in ethnomusicology has sought to theorize soundscapes and listening practices during wartime—yet most work to date has focused on combatants. In this seminar, based on ethnographic work, recent literature and my own experiences as a civilian during the 2014 Israel-Gaza conflict, I will explore how sounds contribute to the construction of civilians, musicians—and ethnomusicologists—as unwittingly active participants in a war zone. I will also consider how both the violent context of these sounds and the intensity of the embodied responses to them raise ethical and methodological challenges for fieldwork and analysis.

Abigail Wood is an ethnomusicologist and senior lecturer in the Music Department, School of Arts, University of Haifa, and co-editor of Ethnomusicology Forum. Her research focuses primarily on musical life in contemporary urban spaces, from new Jewish musics to the reflection of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in the contested soundscapes of Jerusalem's Old City.