Music Research Seminars
01 October, 2025, 4:00pm - 6:00pm
Armstrong Building | Newcastle University
Music Research Seminars
Annie Lennox’s pop career as lead singer of Eurythmics and as a solo artist has epitomised the concept of ‘renewal’ through constant reinvention of her celebrity image via her stage personas. Lennox’s later life performances, which reimagine songs from throughout her career, rely less on reinvention of her image and instead focus on ‘sonic shape shifting’. These performances largely bypass typical ‘decline narratives’ (Gullette, 2004; Gardner, 2020) and ‘double standards of ageing’ (Sontag, 1972) that ageing female popular musicians are frequently subjected to.
In this talk I discuss two performances of ‘Why’ (originally from Lennox’s 1992 debut solo album, Diva) and investigate how these allow us to rethink renewal in age contexts beyond associations with youth and anti-ageing. I examine Lennox’s ‘ageless voice’ and place this as a mirror which reflects her past and refracts aspects of her present. In her 2021 performance of ‘Why’ I consider Lennox’s ‘vocal absence’ as a space to ‘hear’ past versions of the song, as well as amplify the pandemic context the performance was situated within. I then focus on her 2023 performance of ‘Why’, analysing the ‘vocal embellishment’ she incorporates into the ending of the song. I consider how this may transform our understanding of the ‘original’ from 1992 as it is revised and renewed. Through both performances I suggest that Lennox continues to subvert gender stereotypes by challenging typical decline narratives usually faced by ageing female popular musicians.
Emma Longmuir is a PhD candidate in Music and Media at Newcastle University and a recipient of the Clara Whittaker Music PhD Scholarship. Her PhD thesis focuses on Annie Lennox’s performances from 2020 onwards, arguing that Lennox’s later life performances challenge ‘decline narratives’ which are frequently attributed to ageing female popular musicians. Emma was the 2023 winner of the IASPM UK&I Andrew Goodwin Memorial Prize for her essay focusing on Lennox’s ‘ageless voice’ in her lockdown and post-lockdown performances of ‘Here Comes the Rain Again’. She has also recently published an article on Lennox’s later-life approaches to renewal in her 2021 performance of ‘Why’.
In addition to exploring the partimento tradition and learning about a few key schemas, this lecture-recital features one of Zachow’s capriccios and a recently unearthed capriccio from a Hungarian manuscript, which Carsten Wollin has attributed to Handel as a ‘parody.’ What do the relationships between texture, harmony, and melody demonstrate about Handel’s ‘authentic’ voice and keyboard practices? An open-ended comparison, expanding Wollin’s argument, shows how schema theory can elucidate the improvisational impulse found in a keyboardist’s hands. The program concludes with two suites side by side—the only surviving suite by Zachow, and the first from Handel’s first set of published suites.
Jonathan Salamon is an award-winning historical keyboardist originally from New York, NY. A former Fulbright Scholar in the Netherlands, he has performed and presented scholarship across the United States and Europe. Jonathan is currently the Principal Keyboardist with the Chamber Orchestra of New York, with whom he made his Carnegie Hall debut as a soloist. A passionate educator, he was formerly an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Purchase College, State University of New York. He received his bachelor's degree in Piano Performance from NYU and graduate degrees in Harpsichord Performance from the Yale School of Music. Jonathan is currently a PhD candidate in music history at the University of Cambridge supported by a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.