Music’s presence as a public art and a collective experience, and therefore as a medium and significant mechanism for defining and galvanizing a sense of community, shared beliefs, and identity has been a significant but poorly understood constant in the modern history of Europe and North America. As groups and nations engage in war, itself a decisive form of collective social action, music, in the form of marches and songs, immediately comes to mind, as do anthems and all manner of military music, including fife and drums, trumpets and bagpipes. Music has long been employed to inspire fear in one’s opponents and bravery in one’s own warriors. Since the advent of technologies of mass communication, however, it is the role of music in war beyond the battlefield that invites equal scrutiny. Indeed, there turns out to be no shortage of music directed at the civilian population designed to deepen patriotic fervor, extol victory, and lament defeat without embracing capitulation.