Music and Punishment in the British Army in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

Until prohibited after an intensive public campaign in the later nineteenth century, members of the British armed forces could expect to be subjected to severe forms of corporal punishment and/or humiliating treatment, sometimes for even relatively minor offences. Such punishments were generally car...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:The World of Music 2013-01, Vol.2 (1), p.9-30
Main Author: Grant, M.J.
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
18th century
19th century
Accompaniments
Armies
Ceremonies
Courts martial
Crime
Drums
Military discipline
Military Music
Musical periods
Musicians
Parliaments
Soldiers
Symbolism
Torture
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Summary:Until prohibited after an intensive public campaign in the later nineteenth century, members of the British armed forces could expect to be subjected to severe forms of corporal punishment and/or humiliating treatment, sometimes for even relatively minor offences. Such punishments were generally carried out in public, and in this way served as a warning to other soldiers. Depictions of such scenarios often show military musicians accompanying these punishment rituals; indeed, the phrase "drumming out" to describe dismissal in disgrace has its literal origins in some of these practices. What images alone do not tell us, however, is that from the later seventeenth century, it was the drummers who were charged with inflicting the most severe types of corporal punishment as well. This article explores the origins, practical purpose and symbolic logic behind this very particular connection between military music and military discipline, which, as is so often the case with military traditions, was not limited to the British Army, and which reveals much about the connection between music and torture in more recent times as well.
ISSN:0043-8774
1944-8260