Almost all societies in today’s world are martial cultures: that is, cultures predicated to a greater or lesser extent on the possibility of war and on the collective memory of war. War is not simply violence, although violence––the act of killing specifically––is its very heart: war is a cultural system which, since Neolithic times, has come increasingly to define the world in fundamental ways. I have talked here of the musicology of “war and collective violence”, whereby collective violence is actually the superordinate category and war, in its various forms, a special case thereof––a very special case indeed, given its enormous social, political and cultural significance.