Music scholars track multiple ways people wield music in cultural conflicts. When communities frame political differences in moral terms, cultural, racial/ethnic, and class signifiers invoked by music enhance this framing and foster belonging. Artists and audiences leverage music to crystallize critiques, draw boundaries, and discredit the positions of imagined others. This roundtable gathers scholars of diverse traditions, each of whom centers the ways both artists and listeners deploy complex, sometimes conflicted, moral reasoning. We advocate for ethnographic approaches in understanding and analyzing these phenomena and the debates they support in various public spheres.

Presenters analyze (1) French media condemnations of Aya Nakamura’s 2024 Olympics performance as un-French; (2) how transnational networks of white nationalist activists recode recordings to their own ideological ends; (3) how Turkish artists negotiate top-down state initiatives and grassroots opponents; (4) how digital technologies affect collective practices of signification as DIY gains new significance within US political discourses; (5) how Indigenous musicians in South Asia familiarize global audiences with human rights abuses during the Indo-Naga conflict; and (6) how Greek nightclubs maintain cultural intimacies based on rigid heteronormativity and white nationalism, conveying anti-globalist aesthetics. Together, these case studies explore how we might recenter music as an underanalysed form of moral reasoning in conflicts understood as “culture wars.” Using music as both a form of expression and a method of investigation, we seek to account for making and listening together, moving towards a cohesive approach to musical practices as simultaneously representing, circulating, and acting in cultural conflicts.