Insurgent Choir

i. war music

The warmachine is loud. Amidst the image overload of horrific violence saturating the slick screen of a smartphone – the flames, the billowing smoke, the predatory sheen of weaponry – there is cacophony. Missiles screech, tanks roar, and civilians howl in agony and fury at the perpetration of ongoing injustice and genocide. For those caught in the warzone, there is no quieting it, no clicking the mute button; noise is an inescapable reality and the voices of the resistance strain against it.

you will sleep through my spring till it's over

During the First World War, soldiers and civilians were regularly exposed to up to 185 dB of continual noise from high-energy weapons, causing jarring injury to the fluid filled ducts and chambers of the inner ear. The term applied to this was labyrinthine concussion – an abstraction of violence into a maze, into the imperceptible, the chronic. The Oxford War Primers, a series of short medical texts published in England, dismissed hearing loss as ‘malingering and exaggeration’.

I am lighter:

With the introduction of anti-armour weapons and medium mortar bombs during the Second World War, the noise of war regularly exceeded 188 dB. Subsequent ‘development’ in weapon capacity/lethality has meant that war regularly breaks the sound barrier, with violence cutting the air at hypersonic speeds, perforating eardrums. Indeed, large-scale Israeli bombing and sonic-boom air raids have led to countless cases of sensorineural hearing loss among the Palestinian population of Gaza and the West Bank.

in front of strangers I sing

ii. the song is a gun

The Israel Occupation Force has its own choir – multiple choirs, to be precise, organised around themes and concepts central to the country’s military mission. Most songs performed are meant to motivate, rally, and inspire via nationalistic sentiment, referencing a biblical claim to land or justifying the nation-building agenda at the heart of contemporary Zionism. Videos of troops singing Am Yisrael Chai (‘The Nation of Israel Lives’) or Hatikvah (‘The Hope’), Israel’s national anthem, frequently circulate on Israeli social media, morphing into a homogenous chant of territorial claim. The chant and the choral are diametrically opposed, one reliant on a repetitive denting of ‘the message’ into tongue, heart, and head, the other like the faintest impression on a shroud, a gentle carrying.

The song Shir LaShalom (‘A Song for Peace’) doesn’t get much airplay these days. First performed in 1969 by Lehakat HaNahal, a now defunct Israeli musical ensemble, the pop song sought to prioritise peace at a time of intensifying nationalism and to directly challenge the country’s commemorative culture – specifically the entanglement of the valorisation of war and the emphasis of bereavement.  

Whilst the choirs of the IOF are averse to incorporating the song into their repertoire, Shir LaShalom can still be encountered at the National Photo Collection of Israel in the form of a blood-stained sheet of lyrics. Found in the breast pocket of the former Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin after his assassination by Yigal Amir, an Israeli right-wing extremist known for his ardent support of and participation in settler violence, the sheet of paper remains a silent relic of the ongoing occupation – a failed buffer to murder and a failed song of peace.

iii. the furies

Historically, choral rehearsal in Ancient Greece was also a rehearsal for battle and citizenship. Consisting of 12 to 50 participants dancing, singing, and speaking their lines in unison, the choral performance functioned as a ‘vital act of transfer’, to borrow Diana Taylor’s description, honing the skills of the hoplite [citizen battalions] through a rank-and-file khoros [chorus]. It was thought to encourage skills of orderliness, obedience, and co-ordination, as hoplites sang to the tune of the aulos – an instrument at the core of battle formation (Shüler 2017).

Whilst men were free to perform their warring khoros, the voices of women inspired sanction and scorn – particularly when their voices sang in sirenic unison. In her essay Gender of Sound (1994), writer Anne Carson traces the association between female voice and evil, guiding readers through histories of classical thought which rendered women’s singing otherworldly, savage, and supernatural, to be barred from the public sphere. There was a ‘political nakedness’ to women’s singing, frequently prone to disorderly and uncontrolled outflow, which could endanger the regulated civic space (the polis).  

Indeed, the ololyga, a ritual shrieking heard during climactic moments of women’s lives, was often compared to the evil howls of Furies, the unending songs of sirens, and the heart chilling groan of the female monster, Gorgon. Denied the description as chorus or song, the ololyga in the popular imagination was reduced to shrieking, wailing, subbing, shrill lament, loud laughing, or screams of pain or of pleasure, carried by the voices of many women, often in unison (Holst-Warhaft 1991). Akin to Medusa’s serpents, the ololyga was depicted as a mess of tangled tongues and notes, without direction and without form – the medley of an army of hysterics.

An otherworldly echo of women’s awful yearly shrieking

iv. like a thistle in your throat 

My voice was like Gorgon’s the first time I had sang with the protest choir. A friend joked that I must have swallowed a thistle in my sleep as we marched towards the glinting perimeter fence of the Royal Naval Armaments Depot (RNAD) Coulport on Loch Long in Argyll, Scotland – the storage and loading facility for the nuclear warheads of the UK’s Trident programme (Ainslie 2012). I remember purple flower heads everywhere, with sharp green spikes wrapping around the steel barbed wire scar of the Depot and my vocal chords.

And from where we stand their cries are drowned

I joined the choir as part of a summer disarmament camp organised under the Faslane Action for the Bomb Ban (FABB) initiative, which sought to agitate for the complete dismantling of Britain’s military-industrial complex. Coulport was just north of Glasgow’s Clyde River Corridor, another major site of military-industrial accumulation and ongoing struggle over the supply of arms to overseas imperial warfare projects. From my tent at Peaton Wood, the protest camp, BAE Systems’ new ‘frigate factory’, which sends warships to places like Yemen and Palestine, was less than an hour away. The ‘Second City of Empire’ just beyond the loch’s waters (MacKenzie 2017).  

On most days there was no time for vocal warm-up. Actions started as soon as the minibuses began to arrive at the Depot, and the armoured vehicles, and the cop cars, and the trucks. Unlike the phalanx of the Ancient Greek hoplites, shoulder to shoulder in tight formation, we’d sing as cloud, spore, or murmuring. Shapeshifting was our strategy, allowing our voices to evade being pierced by the shrill alarms of the base, the orders barked using loudspeakers, and the aggressive car horns of off-duty soldiers passing by.

I will write your name oh my country, above the sun that never sets.

The founder of the original ‘Protest in Harmony’ choir, Jane Schonveld, was inspired to assemble a choir after attending an antiwar march in 2003, organised in opposition to the invasion of Iraq by US forces. Schonveld was struck by the almost total absence of protest singing and the silence which made space for certain hesitation. Whilst the march can be considered a conspiratorial formation – a close huddling of the ideologically likeminded – the protest choir gets even closer to the etymological root of the word conspiracy, conspirare, an act of shared breathing. Perhaps it also gets close to the root of the word collusion, colludere, the transmission of a secret through collective play.

From these language games, we can conclude that singing together signals something suspicious yet playful, intuitive yet insurgent. It pushes breath to exceed itself into refusal and resistance. I think of how the choir avoids what anthropologist Laura Nader termed ‘coercive harmony’ (2019, p. 81), a strategy for controlling people through forced compromise and consensus. In the choir, harmony is crafted through difference, opposition, friction; a mystical tension between semitones.

v. voices against the warmachine

Decolonial feminist thinker Maria Lugones once wrote ‘I am incomplete and unreal without other women. I am profoundly dependent on them’ (1987, p. 8). Decades later Laurent Berlant echoed a similar sentiment, writing in her book Cruel Optimism: ‘bodies make each other a little more possible: but they can’t do everything…what we do have together, in the middle of this thing, is a brush with solidarity, and that’s real’ (2011, p. 266). In the protest choir, I felt the power of an act performed in concert with others. The call and response. The attentiveness to one’s cue and the pleasure of affirming and reaffirming the voice of another.

The radical infrastructure of the choir rejects the ‘erect, autonomous ‘I’ that stands straight and tall at its centre’ (Hanley 2022, p. 2553). There’s no solo performer in the protest choir, no individualistic form of political life and voice. Instead, there is sororal and choral inclination, a leaning ‘out of the self’ and toward other bodies, emotions, and histories (Cavarero 2021, p. 39). From the activist choirs scattered across the post-Yugoslav territory, reanimating partisan songs via new registers, to the polyphonic arrangements of the Fayha choir, with a repertoire mixing music from Lebanon, Syria, Egypt, Palestine, and Iraq, the choir sings beyond grief and anger, turning contrapuntal.  

vi. the bluebell

In Scottish and English folklore, a bluebell tucked into a pocket or worn as a garland will compel a person to only speak the truth. A week after the 7th of October and the outbreak of Israel’s genocidal campaign, I joined the thousands marching down Buchanan Street in Glasgow towards Pacific Quay. As we sang from river to the sea Palestine will be free, all I could see were mouths brimming with bluebells. A call for justice, a belated bloom of blue, and the choral inclination of the masses – voices imperfect but true.

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