Voices and vocalities
Exploring the voice in all its forms - from opera and pop to technology and identity - as a window into culture, politics, and the self.
Socially-engaged music in theory and practice
Our research explores the voice in all its forms - from opera and pop to technology and identity - as a window into culture, politics, and the self.
Some of our ongoing and recent projects and groups include:
- Opera from its origins to the present day
- Voice in popular music
- Voice in education
- Voices in and with technology
- Voice, self, identity (psychoanalysis, politics)
Adam Behr
Reader in Music, Politics and Society
I teach and research the intersections between the creative industries, cultural policy, music, and politics. I'm also interested in the sociology and history of popular music and their relationship to the politics of popular culture.
Following a PhD on the historical context and social dynamics of rock bands at the University of Stirling, I have researched and published on cultural policy, music and politics, music and election campaigns, the music industries, and the popular music of the mid-twentieth to twenty first centuries.
In addition to academic writing, I've written extensively for the web, as an editor and contributor to the Live Music Exchange site, for The Conversation and elsewhere.
Charlotte Bentley
Lecturer in Music
My research focuses on operatic mobility in the nineteenth century, using the translation of opera into non-European environments as a way of examining questions of international cultural transfer in the period more broadly.
I have explored the New Orleans's place within growing global operatic systems, arguing for the centrality of human agency to the long-term development of transatlantic networks of production, as well as the role of material culture in promoting an increasingly international operatic discourse. At the same time, I have sought to understand the more distinctively local aspects of the city’s operatic life, in terms of the theatre-going experience and the adaptation/reception of particular works.
My other research interests include Jules Massenet, operatic realism, and the influence of media technologies on the production and reception of opera in the late nineteenth century.
Ian Biddle
Professor of Music History
I'm a cultural theorist and musicologist, working on a range of topics in music- and sound-related areas, especially in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
My work ranges from the cultural history of music and masculinity, theorising music's intervention in communities and subjectivities, sound, soundscapes and urban experience, and the politics of noise.
I'm interested in memory studies, sound studies, Italian workerist and autonomist theory, psychoanalysis and theoretical approaches to 'affective' states. I'm the co-founder and co-ordinating editor (with Richard Middleton) of the journal Radical Musicology.
Eric Doughney
Lecturer in Music
I'm a musicologist and cultural theorist. A graduate in Theatre Design from the Central School of Art and Design (now Central St. Martins), London, I received my MLitt and PhD in Music from Newcastle University.
I've designed for theatre (drama, contemporary dance, ballet, and opera) and, as both a staff member of the BBC Design Group and as a freelancer, for film and television, specialising in music and arts productions.
Research interests include the musical and prose works of Richard Wagner; Wagnerism; The Bayreuth Festival as Index of Germany's Now; nationalism in music; music broadcasting, and the interrelation of politics, policies, and socio-cultural trends in the broadcasting of Western Art Music within the UK.
Richard Elliott
Senior Lecturer in Music
I'm a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world.
My research interests are wide but mostly 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.
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.
Nancy Kerr Elliott
Lecturer in Folk and Traditional Music
I'm a folk educator with over 25 years’ teaching experience in both formal and informal education settings. I've led workshops and choirs and taught 1:1 at festivals, residential courses, schools and universities in the UK, Australia, Canada, Europe and Asia.
My music psychotherapy background informs my practice as a facilitator of client-led music-making throughout the lifespan.
Subject areas include:
- Creative Practice Research
- Traditions of these Islands
- Folk Ensemble
- Applied Songwriting & Composition (Folk & Modal)
- Folk Music, Gender & Identity
Bennett Hogg
Senior Lecturer
Current Work
- composing music for release with Arts Council of England funded book with Mike Collier, Geoff Sample, and Alex Charrington - also writing a chapter for this book.
- commission for new work for Icelandic early music group Nordic Affect.
- commission for ten-string guitar piece for CD release in 2019 by Stefan Ostersjo.
- co-investigator on "Bee-ing Human", Leverhulme Trust three-year funded interdisciplinary research project on Charles Butler's The Feminine Monarchie, a 17th-century book on bees and beekeeping, and co-investigator (Newcastle University lead) on Sonic Intangibles, a twi-year joint UKRI-funded interdisciplinary project exploring data sonification.
- Co-editor of special issue of Seismograf, a Danish music and sound art journal specialising in the innovatory "audio paper" format.
- Director of Landscape Quartet - formerly an AHRC-funded environmental sound art project.
- Curator and producer of sound art and music for Cheeseburn Grange Sculpture Gardens, Stamfordham, Northumberland.
- co-editing with Matthew Sansom a new edited issue of Contemporary Music Review - "Music, Sound, and Landscape" - now in press
Julia Partington
Senior Lecturer
My research interests include the potential benefits of music education in early childhood as a means to address disadvantage and promote the wellbeing of children and families in challenging circumstances.
My doctoral thesis centred on collaborative approaches for teachers and visiting musicians working in primary music classrooms that aim to empower primary class teachers in terms of their own musical confidence and skills.
Larry Zazzo
Senior Lecturer in Music
I joined Newcastle University in 2017 and continue to perform in concert halls and opera houses throughout the world. I have made over 25 recordings of rarely-performed Baroque vocal masterpieces as well as premiering new works by Thomas Adès, Jonathan Dove, Missy Mazzoli, Iain Bell, Rolf Riehm, and Geoff Page.
In addition to my ongoing research into Baroque opera and oratorio, performer wellbeing, historical performance practice, and opera libretto authorship recognition, my recent world-premiere recordings include Jonathan Dove's dramatic cantata for countertenor, Hojoki, with the BBC Philharmonic (Orchid Classics), and Baroque Gender Stories, a collaboration with mezzo soprano Vivica Genaux and Lautten Compagney Berlin exploring disguise and gender ambiguity in late Baroque opera (Sony Classics).
I frequently presents workshops and masterclasses around the world (working recently with young singers at the Barock Vokal Akademie Mainz, the Utrecht Conservatoire and Capetown University's opera studio), and have been a jury member for the Cesti Voice Competition in Innsbruck as well as a jury chair for the London Handel Singing Competition. I regularly give interviews in both UK and European media, such as Radio 3's The Listening Service and In Tune as well as Dutch and Croatian classical radio programmes focusing on his creative practice and musicological research.
At Newcastle, in addition to my roles as Head of Performance and Senior Tutor, I regularly lead a group of Music students in a year-long module, Performing Early Opera, conducting and directing fully-staged, historically-informed performances of Baroque dramatic works, including Handel's Acis and Galatea and Purcell's Dido and Aeneas and Fairy Queen at the Tyne Theatre and Opera House and at Seaton Delaval Hall.