Civil War bands, indispensable to both Union and Confederate troops, were employed by officers to keep morale high during times of rest and relaxation, and to instill regional pride during times of battle. I engage in an inquiry into the functions of the Civil War band in order to highlight the nature of music as it offers at one moment the emotional integration of camaraderie and at another moment the impetus to spur soldiers to combat. As a means of investigating such cases, I start with the poem “Union Camp Music,” included in my recent book of poems, Cyclorama , and conclude with a discussion of the receptive functions activated by both poetry and music in the listeners of each art form. Both poetry and music depend upon bodily reactions, the former relying more upon a referentiality inherent to meaning, the latter upon a nonreferentiality that can turn intention obscure. Both art forms, nonetheless, retain as a primary effect, the performer-to-listener synchrony that derives from somatic response.

During the American Civil War, women in the parlor imagined life at the front through music, playing pieces and singing songs on topics related to the conflict. Among the genres that they performed were battle pieces for the piano, episodic works that depict incidents of battle and their outcome in victory. These pieces constituted a genre that had long been a favorite of female amateur performers, their lineage beginning with Frantisek Kotzwara's 1788 Battle of Prague , which remained steadily popular throughout the nineteenth century. This article examines Civil War battle pieces by tracing their roots to Kotzwara's famous piece. By constructing a reception history of that work as it appears in nineteenth-century literary sources, the article retrieves some alternatives to the abundant satirical readings of the Battle of Prague in period fiction. It suggests that Civil War battle music played several important roles in the lives of its players. The music invited women to imagine and embody the conflicts on the battlefield, to challenge society's expectations of women as both pianists and as contributors to the war effort in public capacities, and to reflect on the costs of the war. The article goes on to examine a battle piece by a female composer and to consider amateur women's performances of battle repertoire during the war years. Finally, drawing inspiration from the accounts in fiction of Kotzwara's Battle of Prague , it concludes by imagining a woman's performance of a battle piece on the heels of the Battle of Gettysburg.

The terms “sentimentalism” and “sensibility” play a central role in contemporary scholarly discourse on literature and intellectual theory in the long nineteenth century. Often used interchangeably, these words identify developments in popular culture and philosophy in which emotions and feelings, as opposed to reason and logic, were seen as the routes to moral and social improvement. In visual, literary, and musical artworks of the era, the emphasis on feeling was frequently connected to a male archetype of the sentimental protagonist, a “dying poet,” marked by several common elements: great creativity, high levels of sensitivity, physical and emotional fragility, significant moments of disappointment, and early (and often self-inflicted) death. The subject of the dead or dying young man assumed critical significance during the 1860s, when so many soldiers were lost during the Civil War. For his immensely popular work The Dying Poet (1864), composer-pianist Louis Moreau Gottschalk likely drew inspiration from two French poems of the same title that employed both the dying poet trope and complex imagery of reminiscence. Although The Dying Poet was one of Gottschalk's most popular and lucrative pieces, it was composed during a time of relative discontent and melancholy. In the mid-1860s, he was traveling across the Civil War-torn United States on a gruelingly unrelenting schedule. Gottschalk's composition The Dying Poet can be viewed as a poignant paradox—a simultaneous example of his great sensitivity to the desires of his audience and a tantalizingly autobiographical glimpse of the profound loneliness he felt while performing for them.