From “Yankee Doodle” rallying Civil War Union soldiers, to the use of heavy metal as a form of torture after 9/11, researchers, poets, and musicians explored the use of music in military conflicts at an April 18 conference held at the Lincoln Center campus.

The conference, “Music, the Civil War, and American Memory,” primarily focused on songs from Civil War, which ended 150 years ago this month. But music from World War I, the Vietnam War, and recent middle-eastern conflicts was evoked as well.

The cornerstone of the event was the just-rereleased original version of Walt Whitman’s Drum Taps by New York Review Books. Whitman wrote the series while serving as a hospital volunteer tending wounded and dying Civil War soldiers. Lawrence Kramer, PhD, Distinguished Professor of English and Music, edited the collection and wrote the introduction to the book, which had not been published in its entirety since 1865.

Kramer said that the Drum Taps poems mark the beginning of a modernist vein of poetry that reached its apex during World War I. It and other modernist poems represent a clear departure from heroic war narratives that defined the epic poetry of ancient Greece. Like the Civil War photography of Matthew Brady, Whitman’s poems unflinchingly document the brutal realities of war.

For veteran Anthony Romeo, a freshman in the School of Professional and Continuing Studies, Drum Taps speaks of the same realities of war found in today’s Middle Eastern conflict. Romeo served for five years in the U. S. Navy and was deployed twice, to Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The descriptions still hold true; missing the families, the holidays, and the grief and misery that comes along with war,” he said. “It’s graphic, … but being descriptive helps those who haven’t served [to]have a clearer understanding. It’s probably harder for veterans to read, but sometimes it’s a relief.”

In a talk on music’s impact on wartime, musicologist Richard Leppert, PhD, Regents Professor at the University of Minnesota, said that the public’s perception of wartime music is often steeped in patriotism.

“The guys in the field see the songs differently than the popular culture listening to it,” he said.

He noted that the World War I infantrymen changed the lyrics in the famous song “Over There,” from “And we won’t come back till it’s over, over there” to “We won’t be back we’ll be buried, over here.”

The conference presentations included readings by Fordham’s Poets Out Loud Prize winners Daneen Wardrop, author of Cyclorama, and Terrence Chiusano, author On Generation & Corruption.

Wardrop said that the Civil War music was both “luring and lulling” and that even in battle music was played constantly. Bugle calls heralded an attack and bands frequently played throughout the battle. Sometimes bands from opposite sides competed, she said.

She described duels between Union and Confederate bands camped in adjacent fields. At Spotsville, Kentucky, a New Hampshire soldier recorded that the musical exchange was so aggressive that it ended in volleys of actual ammunition. At Stones River, Tennessee, a Union band played “Yankee Doodle” while a Confederate band played “Bonnie Blue Flag.” Eventually, they ended as one band playing “Home! Sweet! Home,” as tens of thousands of Confederate and Union soldiers sang together.

The event culminated with a concert for tenor and piano, featuring a musical setting by Kramer that was inspired by Wardrop and Whitman’s poems, Whitman settings by Kurt Weill, several Fordham students, and others. The tenor was the internationally renowned Rufus Müller. Pianist Julia Hsu accompanied him.

“On the ferry-boats, the hundreds and hundreds that cross, returning

So wrote Walt Whitman in an era before the Brooklyn Bridge was built, a time when the only way to get from the City of New York to the then-City of Brooklyn was via ferry. It’s a part of the city’s history that Roger Panetta, Ph.D., lecturer in history, would like to see revitalized.

“One of the things that bridges and tunnels have done is that they’ve encapsulated our experience of the water,” he said. “But in the ferry you can feel it. You can smell it.”

As curator of the Hudson River Collection for the University Libraries and as a former curator at the Hudson River Museum, Panetta sits at the epicenter of a golden age for local history, and of riverfront history in particular.

But it wasn’t the verses of Whitman that drew Panetta to the river. Sing Sing prison did. He wrote his dissertation on the famous correctional facility that sits on the banks of the Hudson River just north of Sleepy Hollow.

Literary references aside, Panetta reserves his own rhythmic prose for when he discusses urban infrastructure, including upstate prisons. Standing at the edge of the newly configured Brooklyn Bridge Park, he points out how air vents of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel represent a defeat of master builder Robert Moses’s plan to build a bridge that would have destroyed the waterway vista. In a quick aside he adds that First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt played a decisive part in the drama.

Born and bred in Brooklyn, Panetta’s scholarly journey researching Sing Sing also took him to the suburbs. He eventually shifted away from the narrow focus of the prison and toward the study of the county that it was housed in, Westchester—one of the country’s first suburbs. The high-toned history of the commuter lifestyle has been recently popularized in television and the movies, but Panetta was well ahead of the curve, having edited a 2006 book on the subject titled, Westchester: The American Suburb (Fordham University Press).

“I had an impulse to find, within the local, reflections of national issues,” he said. “This has really been a dominant theme in my academic life, research, and teaching.”

Panetta said it’s no accident, then, that he has now come full circle and is living back in the community where he was born and bred. He is currently the visiting scholar at the Brooklyn Historical Society, where he is researching the ferries, as well as the history of the Manhattan skyline—as seen from the Brooklyn Heights Promenade.

Panetta said the promenade’s elevated perch was always used to document the scope and power of the city as it grew. But as he gestured to the Manhattan skyline to make his point, he did so from the sea-level vantage of Brooklyn Bridge Park, formerly a series of industrial piers. He said the challenge of reimagining the waterfront for each successive generation has always been to figure out what anew use could be. Too often planners tried to resuscitate the recent past.

“See those tall [masts],” he said pointing to the historic ships of the endangered South Street Seaport Museum. “They were the first skyscrapers. Wall Street [had]its financial connection to South Street; now its towers engulf it.”

While he applauded the 1970s-era festival-market design of the soon-to-be-re-renovated seaport, he said that its connection to the past wasn’t authentic enough. People, he said, need to connect to the river in a more real and meaningful way.

“In that sense we’ve gone full circle to the 19th century, when thousands of people commuted every day from this very same pier,” he said, as the new East River Ferry arrived and discharged a dozen or so passengers. “It’s the visceral experience of the water that’s so critical.”