This paper examines how incarcerated Japanese and Japanese American musicians asserted their “symbolic mobility” (Asai 2023) and rejected U.S. Americanization projects by performing Japanese military music (gunka) during World War II. Following the 1943 segregation of ostensibly disloyal “No-Nos” to the Tule Lake Relocation Center, incarcerated men covertly formed pro-Japan fraternal organizations such as the Sokuji Kikoku Hoshidan (即時歸國奉仕団) and Hokoku Seinendan (報國青年団) to contest their imprisonment. As part of their protestations, the Seinendan organized a bugle corps that paraded around the camp as part of a broader Japanese cultural training regimen. War Relocation Authority (WRA) officials responded by cracking down on bugling activities, raiding the group’s headquarters to squash “anti-American” activity. Nevertheless, the Seinendan bugle corps remained active until the end of the war. While much ethnomusicological scholarship has highlighted how music shaped wartime ethnic identity formation and national belonging for incarcerated Japanese Americans (Waseda 2005; Barbour 2014; Robertson 2017; Asai 2024), the explicitly anti-U.S. sentiments of the Seinendan suggests that music also served as a significant site of political dissent “at camp.” In this paper, I draw upon archival documents and confiscated, handwritten music notation from the U.S. National Archives to consider how Japanese military music contested WRA efforts to police "No-No" political expression. I argue that, unlike musical efforts towards cultural citizenship (Rosaldo 1997), gunka performance rejected the assimilationist agenda of the WRA, allowing incarcerated musicians to assert their symbolic mobility through physical, cultural, and political agency in the face of immobility and confinement.

The Southeast Asian country of Myanmar (also known as Burma) is controlled by a military dictatorship. The dictatorship oversees an ecosystem of cultural production that includes films, print media, standup comedy, and music recordings. These recordings, which are the focus of this presentation, are called colloquially “army songs” or “soldier songs,” and are disseminated via regime-controlled television programs and on social media. Burmese people usually dismiss all regime-produced materials as nothing but lies. I argue that army songs do include lies of commission and of omission, but they are best understood as propaganda. Scholars of musical propaganda (eg. Perris 1985, Morris 2014, Fauser 2019, Godfrey 2019, Sultanova 2025) have often declined to engage with the founding theories of propaganda studies, with the result that propaganda in music is only fuzzily understood. In this presentation I analyze several Burmese army songs using Alfred McClung’s seminal appeal-bond-commodity framework for defining propaganda, demonstrating that the army songs push a consistent commodity using number of different appeals. I contextualize these appeals by explaining how they are relevant to Burmese listeners, the intended audience for army songs. This presentation also reveals that propaganda theory, which was first developed to address government messaging in liberal democracies, is also useful in illuminating the manipulative music produced by one of the world’s most repressive governments.

The ongoing Russian occupation of Ukrainian territories has severely restricted free expression, yet music has emerged as a powerful tool of communication, resistance, and cultural continuity. This paper explores how wartime songs serve as a bridge between Ukrainians in occupied regions and those in free Ukraine, enabling the transmission of censored messages, reinforcing national identity, and sustaining a sense of shared struggle.

Drawing on case studies of songs that have circulated via digital platforms, social media, and underground networks, this study examines how lyrics, melodies, and performance contexts encode meaning that would otherwise be suppressed. Many of these songs rework historical resistance narratives—reviving folk and partisan songs or adapting pre-existing popular tunes to fit contemporary struggles. Others use metaphor, irony, and coded language to navigate censorship while delivering crucial messages of defiance, hope, and connection. Additionally, this presentation explores how songs serve as a means of communication on the military front, facilitating the transmission of messages between armies.

By analyzing the ways in which music functions as a covert yet effective mode of communication between occupied and free territories, this study contributes to broader discussions on the role of sound in information warfare, cultural resilience, and transnational solidarity in conflict settings.

Shell shock, the neurasthenia (nervous exhaustion) diagnosis of World War I, was the first great test for musico-therapy, as the early field was then called. For scientific medicine, shell shock was a dubious condition, and musico-therapy a dubious treatment. Doctors initially believed that shell shock resulted from brain injuries incurred from exploding shells. That organic basis became increasingly doubtful when medical examination did not reveal brain or nerve lesions. Medical humanists have argued that medicine expects symptoms—bodily signs—to signify identifiable medical conditions (Zilcosky 2021, Belling 2012). Neurasthenic patients frustrated that expectation by presenting with medical symptoms—tremors, palpitations, insomnia, memory loss—for which no organic source could be found. This frustration of bodily semiotics made physicians uncertain whether the symptoms they observed were fundamentally physical or psychological. They faced a similar uncertainty regarding musico-therapy. While the therapists insisted their treatment physically soothed shellshocked nerves, physicians wondered if it was mostly a “mental salve.” I draw on William Davis’s (1987, 1993) and Annegret Fauser’s (2013) work on early twentieth century musico-therapy, the published work of musico-therapists such as Eva Augusta Vescelius, and WWI-era news reports of musical treatment to reveal musico-therapy’s neurological strategies of self-validation. I argue that shell shock and musico-therapy legitimized one another within a scientific-medical establishment that doubted whether the condition or its treatment warranted medical attention. My work contributes to medical ethnomusicology by offering WWI musico-therapy as a case of musical negotiation between patients and scientific medicine in the mind-body borderlands where traumatic conditions reside.