Teach the world to sing, and all will be in perfect harmony - or so the songs tell us. Music is widely believed to unify and bring peace, but the focus on music as a vehicle for fostering empathy and reconciliation between opposing groups threatens to overly simplify our narratives of how interpersonal conflict might be transformed. This Element offers a critique of empathy's ethical imperative of radical openness and positions the acknowledgement of moral responsibility as a fundamental component of music's capacity to transform conflict. Through case studies of music and conflict transformation in Australia and Canada, Music Transforming Conflict assesses the complementary roles of musically mediated empathy and guilt in post-conflict societies and argues that a consideration of musical and moral implication as part of studies on music and conflict offers a powerful tool for understanding music's potential to contribute to societal change.

Abstract‘You can hear everything? You can hear my voice?’ The scratchy recording that opens REwind: A Cantata for Voice, Tape, and Testimony prefigures the questions of memory and performance that underlie Philip Miller's multimedia exploration of testimony from South Africa's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). In this article, I adapt Diana Taylor's concepts of the archive and the repertoire to questions of musical communication. I posit that Miller's collage of testimonial ‘shards’, images, and historic audio recordings disrupts the TRC's official narrative by replacing the archive's narrative of completion with one comprising deliberately disjointed moments of individual suffering. The result is an audiovisual creation that sutures together disparate elements to reflect the complexity of the South African truth-telling process. I suggest that in performance, Miller's work re-animates the TRC archive, bringing it into the contemporary repertoire where it re-inscribes the experiences of TRC testifiers for contemporary audiences.

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Sound, music and storytelling are important tools of resistance, resilience and reconciliation in creative practice from protracted conflict to post-conflict contexts. When they are used in a socially engaged participatory capacity, they can create counter-narratives to conflict. Based on original research in three continents, this book advances an interdisciplinary, comparative approach to exploring the role of sonic and creative practices in addressing the effects of conflict. Each case study illustrates how participatory arts genres are variously employed by musicians, arts facilitators, theatre practitioners, community activists and other stakeholders as a means of ‘strategic creativity’ to transform trauma and promote empowerment. This research further highlights the complex dynamics of delivering and managing creativity among those who have experienced violence, as they seek opportunities to generate alternative arenas for engagement, healing and transformation.

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