Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education Electronic Article 35 ______________________________________________________________________________________ Allsup, R. (2009) “Rough Play: Music and Symbolic Violence in an Age of Perpetual War.” Action, Criticism, and Theory for Music Education 8/1: 35-53. http://act.maydaygroup.org/articles/Allsup8_1.pdf Rough Play: Music and Symbolic Violence in an Age of Perpetual War Randall Everett Allsup Teachers College Columbia University The Morning News: Another car bomb went off in Iraq today. More soldiers and civilians died, American and Iraqi. The Taliban has returned to southern Afghanistan. Torture continues in Guantanamo and secret US-sponsored prisons around the world. A marine returns home without her legs. Meanwhile, a grand American city lies dying. The inaction that is the new New Orleans suggests not the “failure of government”—a Bush/Cheney abstraction by way of excuse—but a “willful failure to govern,” an act of violence by neglect (or some say, prejudice). The children of the Los Angeles Riots and Rodney King have grown up. The AIDS pandemic enters its 25 th year, and the United States’ first-ever preemptive war drags on and on, without an end in sight. (Thus began my presentation to the Mayday Colloquium XVIII, Princeton, New Jersey, 23/06/06). We live, unarguably, in a violent world: in hard times, of dark days and nights. In this essay, I ask the questions, what does it mean to live in an age of perpetual war? How do we make sense of everyday violence? How is it symbolically enacted? How is it sublimated and transcended? These are not original questions, but valuable and necessary ones. 1 With regard to music and its place in and outside of school, we might begin an inquiry like this with the anthropological stance, well stated by Alan Merriam (1964), that music is “a summation activity for the expression of value, a means whereby the heart of the psychology of a culture is exposed” (p.225). Even a body as politically neutral as MENC 2 agrees to this. They write in what I think is MENC’s most honest statement on record that music is “a reflection of the culture that produced it.” 3 Good enough. But our profession rarely goes on to ask, as we will here, what it might mean if this selfsame culture is morally corrupt? 4 One way to narrow an examination as broad as this one is to look for a shared vocabulary, a particular symbol or collection of tropes that form a response to or an expression of a history’s time and place. With regard to my introduction, you might take the popular use of military apparel in everyday fashion as one example of the normalization of on-going war. Camouflage cargo pants, whether jungle design or desert storm, are worn