Richard Elliott
I am Senior Lecturer in Music in the International Centre for Music Studies 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) 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) 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.
"""
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 ?
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.
"""
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.
While a number of commentators have picked up on the maturity of Swift’s writing voice, comparatively little attention has been paid to her singing. I address this gap by looking at the conflation of writing/singing in the singer-songwriter’s voice. I examine tensions that have been noted between Swift’s art and her star persona. To what extent, I ask, is the denigration of Swift’s musical style (her singing as much as her move towards chart pop) a gendered attack on young women’s voices? At the same time, what strategies have been used to authenticate Swift as an artist by other critics? I conclude with a discussion of Ryan Adams’s cover of Swift’s 1989 album and the critical discourse surrounding it, arguing that the ‘blank space’ of Swift’s voice becomes legitimated and appropriated by a critical discourse focussed on roots, genre and masculinity.
In this paper, I explore Simone’s extraordinary performance at the 1976 Montreux Jazz Festival, and in particular her rendition of Janis Ian’s song ‘Stars’. I begin by reflecting on Ian’s own experience of celebrity and the way she articulated it in ‘Stars’, then I move on to compare Simone’s version, analysing it in the context of the festival appearance in which it appeared and in the longer text of Simone’s life as an artist and celebrity. Drawing on scholarship connected to celebrity, authorship and liveness, I read the song as exemplifying and challenging narratives of fame and artistic biography. I also reflect on cover versions as modes of authorship, authentication and experience and as live performance as an interface for stars and their audiences.
The film is introduced by Dr Richard Elliott (Universtiy of Sussex), author of Fado and the Place of Longing.
This event will also present a photographic exhibit from the Museu do Fado (Lisbon).
Supported by Instituto Camoes
This paper discusses these issues via an analysis of the work of Nina Simone, an artist whose mid-late career offers valuable insights into the interplay of history, biography and memory. The paper will focus specifically on the representation of innocence and experience via what I term the "late voice". "Lateness", a concept exemplified by Simone's work but which extends to a broad range of modern (post mid-twentieth century) popular musics, refers to five primary issues: chronology (the stage in an artist's career); the vocal act (the ability to convincingly portray experience); afterlife (posthumous careers made possible by phonography); retrospection (how voices "look back" or anticipate looking back); and the writing of age, experience, lateness and loss into song texts.
Brief exposure to three case studies will emphasize the extent to which Wyatt as a musician has made use of words and vocables, even as he has occasionally distanced himself from the importance of lyrics in his music. Furthermore, by focussing on the literary-textual nature of Wyatt’s work, light can hopefully be shed on the ways in which we differentiate popular music from literature. What are the different demands and expectations placed on the “popular” and the “literary”?
Fate seems to be about the inevitable in a relatively uncomplicated manner. But it has a more ambiguous relationship with the predictable. On the one hand, fate acts as an alternative to prediction - what will be will be, we can't know what it will be. But in saying this we are already predicting. When we make claims on music regarding its predictability, what type of prediction are we speaking of? Something we can know because we know what has gone before and see the template that this music is following? Something that is fated? Inevitable? What interventions can be made? Why would we want to make them?
Convention may guide us to expect but we don't know quite what to expect. This "quite what" - a small and subtle detail of difference, an intervention - matters a great deal. Convention and intervention can be seen as a constant teasing between delivery and non-delivery. Like haiku or comedy, popular song transforms the tease of convention and intervention to an art form.
Another way to think of fate in relation to fado is to consider it as a self-resignation. Resigning oneself may not only be a passive, predetermined acceptance of the inevitable; it may also be the result of the exhaustion brought about by an impossible fight. This is self-resignation in the face of an intransigence of the other. After all the battles to make oneself heard, to alter the course of events, to even find a place in a desired community, the intransigent other, backed by the might of establishment, performs a ceaseless wearing down of the subject. To what extent are the 'drooping cadences' of fado and the 'avenging misery' of Morrissey a response to such situations?
In reflecting on the mediation of fado’s ‘memory community’, I will focus on the role of transference in fado songs. Crucial to my thinking here will be a theorising of witnessing whereby I set out the connections between the desire to remember and the imperative to testify to what one has remembered. Witnessing is here thought of as a kind of carrying and I pursue the implications for such a carrying on the writing, memorisation and voicing of song texts. The theory presented is one that has resonance beyond fado music, yet fado provides an exemplary case study given the number of song texts in the genre that focus on notions of carrying and unburdening. Bearing witness and bearing up are crucial themes in fado lyrics, while fado performance style places special emphasis on the carrying-on of tradition and the carrying-out of cathartic tasks.
Keywords: Portugal, fado, memory, witnessing, testimonial
The second strand of my research relates to contemporary fado recordings and performances, especially those of the so-called “new fadistas”, whose popularity over the past decade has brought fado to a high level of visibility internationally. Fado performers have found themselves at the forefront of a star system promoted by the contemporary world music network. This presentation of fado as ‘world music’ has led to notable developments in live and recorded performance, where a balance is sought between the presentation of fado’s specificity as a music associated with Portugal and the felt necessity for a technologically-enhanced ‘universal’ acoustic world. This strand of my work intersects with the other by asking what is gained and lost through this process in terms of fado’s locality.
In this paper I will examine a few of the ways that this witnessing ‘takes place’ by drawing on the work of Roland Barthes, Sylviane Agacinski and M. Christine Boyer amongst others. I will use the song ‘Vielas de Alfama’ (‘Alleyways of Alfama’) as an example of the historicisation of Lisbon and will refer to other city-related fado songs as part of my discussion. Throughout my interest remains with the ways we can read the city and its songs as texts within texts.
Drawing on research into the historiography of fado and on cultural theoretical perspectives on contemporary fado performance, this paper will examine the relationships between fado as a local practice and a global phenomenon. By looking at the mediation between the local and the global it will examine how myth-making and the figure of the “star fadista” provide both the conditions of possibility for effective transmission of fado and a narrative that informs both local knowledge and media promotion of the music in equal measure.