This article illuminates ways in which memory of Ireland's Great Famine or ‘an Gorta Mór’ (1845–1852) shaped US music during the US Civil War (1861–1865). Among scholarship on Irish Americans in the Civil War, few sources substantively address lingering memories and trauma from the Great Famine. Yet, a significant amount of the estimated 1.6 million Irish immigrants living in the US in 1860, 170,000 of whom enlisted in the war, were famine survivors. Music's unique role in emotional life offers robust source material for understanding famine memory in this transnational context. Adopting a concept of ‘private, secret, insidious trauma’ from Laura Brown and Maria P.P. Root, as well as understanding Jeffrey Alexander's ideas about cultural trauma as a sociological process, the article highlights a some of the ways in which famine memories emerged in music-making during the war. Case studies include a survey of US sheet music, the transnational performance and reception history of the song ‘Kathleen Mavourneen’, and research on the life of the northern Union army's most successful bandleader, Patrick Gilmore, who left Athlone, in Ireland famine-ravaged West, as a teenager in the late 1840s. The approach is inherently transatlantic, accounting for histories that occurred in the United States, Ireland and the broader Atlantic world dominated by Britain. The essay illustrates how music can contribute to social history, ways in which the application of research on trauma can inform musicological work, and ways in which traumatic memories can emerge across time and distance, particularly in diasporic contexts.

本文阐明了爱尔兰大饥荒或“Gorta Mór”（1845-1852 年）的记忆如何影响美国内战期间（1861-1865 年）的美国音乐。在关于内战中爱尔兰裔美国人的学术研究中，很少有资料来源实质性地解决了大饥荒挥之不去的记忆和创伤。然而，据估计，1860 年居住在美国的 160 万爱尔兰移民中有相当一部分是饥荒幸存者，其中 17 万人参战。音乐在情感生活中的独特作用为理解这种跨国背景下的饥荒记忆提供了有力的原始资料。采用 Laura Brown 和 Maria PP Root 的“私人、秘密、阴险的创伤”概念，并理解 Jeffrey Alexander 将文化创伤视为社会学过程的观点，这篇文章强调了战争期间饥荒记忆在音乐制作中出现的一些方式。案例研究包括对美国乐谱的调查、歌曲“Kathleen Mavourneen”的跨国表演和接受历史，以及对北方联盟军队最成功的乐队指挥帕特里克吉尔摩的生活的研究，他离开了阿斯隆，在饱受饥荒蹂躏的爱尔兰韦斯特，作为 1840 年代后期的青少年。这种方法本质上是跨大西洋的，考虑了发生在美国、爱尔兰和英国主导的更广泛的大西洋世界的历史。这篇文章阐述了音乐如何为社会历史做出贡献，创伤研究的应用如何为音乐学工作提供信息，以及创伤记忆如何跨越时间和距离出现，尤其是在散居环境中。