Richard Elliott
I am Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University. Prior to that I was based at the University of Sussex as Senior Lecturer in Popular Music.
I am the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010), Nina Simone (Equinox, 2013), The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and DJs do Guetto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). I have also published articles, book chapters and reviews on a number of topics, including popular music, literature, consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology.
My research interests are wide but predominantly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects. My early work explored the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music and was heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality. These ideas were developed in my first book Fado and the Place of Longing, which analysed Portuguese fado music as a reflection and production of space and place.
The topics of memory, nostalgia and revolution are also present in my book on Nina Simone, which combined history, biography and song analysis and which - unusually for publications about this artist - explored the whole of Simone's career. As well as attending to the often-discussed role Simone played in the civil rights era of the 1960s, I explore the artist's late style and start to outline my theory of the late voice.
Another ongoing theme in my work is the various ways in which music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ that take on significance for individuals and communities. More recent work reflects music’s potential to soundtrack lives and histories; My 2015 book The Late Voice explores the representation of time, age and experience in popular song, building its narrative around extended case studies of Ralph Stanley, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
The Sound of Nonsense, published at the very end of 2017 (with a 2018 publication date), reflects my interest in words, music and sound studies. It brings together novelists, nonsense writers, sound poets, experimental composers, comedians and pop musicians in an attempt to get at the role of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.
My other areas of specialisation include the global span of popular music styles from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, music and cultural theory, urban musicology, the poetics of song and the politics of authenticity. I have a background in a variety of disciplines, having gained a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies, a Master’s in Popular Culture and a PhD in Music.
Since 2017, I have been working on a project that explores the materiality of song. That work has so far appeared in some of the articles listed on this site and in the Songs and Objects project on Substack (https://songstudies.substack.com/).
In recent years, I have been posting less new work on this site. For more up-to-date details of my work, please visit my website (latevoice.com), my Substack or my staff profile page at Newcastle University.
Address: School of Arts and Cultures
Armstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
I am the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing: Loss, Memory and the City (Ashgate, 2010), Nina Simone (Equinox, 2013), The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), The Sound of Nonsense (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018) and DJs do Guetto (Bloomsbury Academic, 2022). I have also published articles, book chapters and reviews on a number of topics, including popular music, literature, consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology.
My research interests are wide but predominantly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects. My early work explored the roles played by loss, memory, nostalgia and revolution in popular music and was heavily influenced by theories of place and spatiality. These ideas were developed in my first book Fado and the Place of Longing, which analysed Portuguese fado music as a reflection and production of space and place.
The topics of memory, nostalgia and revolution are also present in my book on Nina Simone, which combined history, biography and song analysis and which - unusually for publications about this artist - explored the whole of Simone's career. As well as attending to the often-discussed role Simone played in the civil rights era of the 1960s, I explore the artist's late style and start to outline my theory of the late voice.
Another ongoing theme in my work is the various ways in which music creates or evokes ‘memory places’ that take on significance for individuals and communities. More recent work reflects music’s potential to soundtrack lives and histories; My 2015 book The Late Voice explores the representation of time, age and experience in popular song, building its narrative around extended case studies of Ralph Stanley, Frank Sinatra, Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Joni Mitchell and Neil Young.
The Sound of Nonsense, published at the very end of 2017 (with a 2018 publication date), reflects my interest in words, music and sound studies. It brings together novelists, nonsense writers, sound poets, experimental composers, comedians and pop musicians in an attempt to get at the role of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.
My other areas of specialisation include the global span of popular music styles from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, music and cultural theory, urban musicology, the poetics of song and the politics of authenticity. I have a background in a variety of disciplines, having gained a Bachelor’s degree in Comparative American Studies, a Master’s in Popular Culture and a PhD in Music.
Since 2017, I have been working on a project that explores the materiality of song. That work has so far appeared in some of the articles listed on this site and in the Songs and Objects project on Substack (https://songstudies.substack.com/).
In recent years, I have been posting less new work on this site. For more up-to-date details of my work, please visit my website (latevoice.com), my Substack or my staff profile page at Newcastle University.
Address: School of Arts and Cultures
Armstrong Building
Newcastle University
Newcastle upon Tyne
NE1 7RU
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This book uses the 2006 compilation DJs do Guetto as a prism for exploring this music's aesthetics and its roots in Lusophone Africa, its evolution in the immigrant communities of Lisbon and its journey from there to the world. The story is one of encounters: between people, sounds, neighborhoods, technologies and cultural contexts. Drawing on reflections by DJ Marfox and others, the book establishes DJs do Guetto as a foundation stone not only for a burgeoning music scene, but also for a newfound sense of pride in a place and a community.
There has been recent growth in research on ageing and the experience of later stages of life, focussing on physical health, lifestyle and psychology, with work in the latter field intersecting with the field of memory studies. The Late Voice seeks to connect age, experience and lateness with particular performers and performance traditions via the identification and analysis of a late voice in singers and songwriters of mid-late twentieth century popular music.
Contents:
Introduction
Chapter 1: Time, Age, Experience and Voice
Chapter 2: ‘Won't You Spare Me Over till Another Year?’: Ralph Stanley’s Late Voice
Chapter 3: September of My Years: Age and Experience in the Work of Frank Sinatra and Leonard Cohen
Chapter 4: Time Out of Mind: Bob Dylan, Age and Those Same Distant Places
Chapter 5: Both Sides Now: Joni Mitchell, Neil Young and the Innocence and Experience of the Singer-Songwriter
Conclusion: Late Thoughts
Bibliography Discography Videography Index
The book begins with a focus on the early part of Simone’s career and a discussion of genre and style. Connecting its analysis to a discussion of social categorization (with particular regard to race), it argues that Simone's defiance of stylistic boundaries can be seen as a political act. From here, the focus shifts to Simone’s self-written protest material, connecting it to her increasing involvement in the struggle for civil rights. The book also provides an in-depth account of Simone's 'possession' of material by writers such as Leonard Cohen, Bob Dylan, Sandy Denny and Judy Collins, while exploring the relationship between the personal and the political. In considering material from the Simone's lesser-known work from the 1970s to the 1990s, the study proposes a theory of the “late voice” in which issues of age, experience and memory are emphasised. The book concludes with a discussion of Simone's ongoing legacy.
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Essays, Articles, Chapters by Richard Elliott
This chapter discusses songs from both these sides of Wyatt’s repertoire to explore the relationships between the cultural geographies of singer-songwriters and protest as articulated via words and sound. I begin by considering Wyatt in light of dominant definitions of the singer-songwriter, particularly those that seek some kind of transparent mediation between the artist’s life and their work. Wyatt challenges such notions through his use of word games, coded lyrics or languages that are foreign to him and which arguably lack the sense of authenticity required for the direct address of the confessional singer-songwriter or the protest singer. Furthermore, Wyatt’s art has been as much about sound in general as about music (and in ways that challenge rather than reinforce distinctions between these terms) and, to this end, I include a brief discussion of sound poetry as a way of considering the sometimes problematic relationship between sound and sense. I link this discussion to one of Wyatt’s political songs, ‘Gharbzadegi’, which takes its name from an Iranian term meaning ‘Westernitis’ or ‘infected by the West’ but which Wyatt’s non-Iranian listeners are unlikely to make sense of without additional guidance. I argue there is a tension between language terms and their meanings which is of interest to discussions of confessional or political singer-songwriters, where we would probably expect there to be a more transparent sense of meaning in the words being sung.
Qu’elle se rapporte au temps ou à l’espace, la nostalgie naît d’un écart ou fossé entre le passé que l’on désire retrouver et le moment présent du désir. À travers cet article, je me propose d’examiner le « fossé nostalgique » et le fossé de représentation. La dynamique est explorée à travers une analyse des « disques de vacances », un genre d’enregistrements devenu très en vogue dans les années 1960. Le genre se situe à la croisée des genres plus connus de l’exotica, mood music, easy listening et ambient, mais s’en distingue par l’usage spécifique qu’il fait de réminiscences géographiques et de faits fictifs. En utilisant l’exemple d’ « April in Portugal », à l’origine un fado portugais qui est par la suite devenu un tube international et un grand classique de la mood music, je réponds à une série de questions qui illustrent le fossé nostalgique. Qu’est-ce qui est effectivement remémoré, qu’est-ce qui est imaginé dans la chanson ? Peut-on établir une différence entre nostalgie « descriptive », tirée d’une expérience vécue, et nostalgie « obligatoire », ou clichée ? Quel genre de rapports la saudade, « bréviaire de la nostalgie » typique du Portugal, entretient-elle avec les types de langues nostalgiques que l’on peut trouver sur d’autres disques de vacances ?
Despite these potential distractions, Saura seems keen to depict the history of fado from its tangled roots to its present position as an urban folk music par excellence, a music that both evokes and inhabits the contemporary Portuguese city (in particular, the city of Lisbon). Through evocative use of light and shadow, Saura offers up a series of highly ‘photographic’ scenes in which fado’s poetics of urban haunting are made prominent. Therefore, rather than critiquing the director for his ‘inauthentic’ depiction of fado, I respond to Saura’s provocation by considering his film as a strategy for setting fado’s poetics of time, space and history in a new light. Taking a cue from the use of choreography and urban tableaux in the film, I offer a spatial reading of Fados that draws upon the work of Michel de Certeau and Henri Lefebvre. I argue that the film makes visible a ‘production of space’ that complements existing fado mythography.