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Staff Profile

Dr Richard Elliott

Senior Lecturer in Music

Background

Richard Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Music at the International Centre for Music Studies. He is a cultural musicologist who works mostly in the discipline of popular music studies. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing (2010), Nina Simone (2013), The Late Voice (2015), The Sound of Nonsense (2018) and DJs do Guetto (2022). He has also written articles, essays and reviews covering popular music, literature, consciousness, ageing, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology. In addition to his academic publications, he writes about music, popular culture and materiality on his Substack, Songs and Objects.


Richard holds degrees in Music (PhD, Newcastle University), Popular Culture (MA, Open University) and Comparative American Studies (BA, University of Warwick). Further details of his work can be found at his website latevoice.com.


Richard is a member of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM) and a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy.


Other links:

Google Scholar profile

Humanities Commons profile

Research

Richard Elliott is a cultural musicologist with a particular interest in popular musics of the world. He is 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 (2022, part of Bloomsbury Academic's 33 1/3 Europe series) He has also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness, ageing, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology.

Richard’s research interests are wide but mostly connect to ways in which music reflects and produces time, space and memorable objects. His 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 his 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 Richard's 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, Richard discusses the artist's late style and starts to outline his theory of the late voice.

Another ongoing theme in Richard's 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; His 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. Richard has written further about late voice in the work of Patti Smith and Bruce Springsteen, and in a study of the song 'Who Knows Where the Time Goes', also contributing to an episode of the BBC series Soul Music devoted to that song. In a related vein, Richard's article on popular music and aging features in the Encyclopedia of Gerontology and Population Aging.

The Sound of Nonsense, published at the very end of 2017 (with a 2018 publication date), reflects Richard’s 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. The book builds on ideas previously explored in two articles about the musician Robert Wyatt.

Richard’s 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. He has 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.

Richard is currently conducting research on the materiality of song and on the representation of global popular musics in the phonographic era. This work is appearing in a variety of formats, including a Substack about songs and objects, an article about Newcastle singer-songwriter Richard Dawson's object-oriented songcraft (forthcoming in Songwriting Studies), an entry in the 33 1/3 Europe series on DJs do Guetto (a 2006 compilation of Luso-African beats) and a chapter on the 1981 pop song 'Japanese Boy' for a collection about One-Hit Wonders.

Richard supervises MA dissertations and PhD theses on areas relating to the topics above.

Teaching

Undergraduate Teaching


Case Studies in 21st-Century Music (MUS3009) covers the following:

  • The scale, history and social significance of the global recording industry in the twenty-first century;
  • A range of themes and topics that characterise global music cultures of our century via a series of contemporary case studies;
  • An understanding of the critical approaches to the study of global popular musics;
  • Different repertoires and approaches to contemporary global music cultures;
  • Communication and critical thinking skills (via case study approach);
  • The importance of musical media (and especially digital media) and related technologies to the global networks of contemporary music;
  • Discourses of the new, the retro and the present as encountered in twenty-first century musics and critical responses to them;
  • Music, place and mobility;
  • 21st century reappraisals of ‘world music’ and ‘global pop’
  • The challenges of curating global pop musics in a fast-moving, hyper-networked world;
  • Cosmopolitans and cosmopolitanisms;
  • Features and repertoires associated with global music genres such (e.g. global rock, hip-hop and DJ cultures)
  • Methods for connecting case studies to sociocultural contexts.



Popular Music and Media (MUS2085) explores the relationship between popular music and media from a variety of critical and sociohistorical perspectives. In posing questions about the ways in which music has been produced, consumed, curated and mutated, the module sheds light on the ideological structures underpinning the mediation of music in the past and present. It does so by examining the relationships between musical production and media technologies (the microphone, phonograph, radio, film, television, mp3, social media, etc.); the changing role and place of music in society as understood through an analysis of media technologies; the meaning and nature of musical mediation and reception in society; the political economy of the music industry; the creative potential of media technologies for processes of musicking and remediation (including mixing, mash-ups, memes and plunderphonics); the mediation of music in work and leisure activities (the use of music while we work and play); case studies of key figures who have shaped our understanding of popular music and media, from musicians and producers to theorists and philosophers.


Postgraduate Teaching


Richard contributes to postgraduate taught modules and supervises MA and MLitt dissertations on a wide range of social, cultural and historical topics. He supervises PhD candidates in areas connected to his teaching and research.

Publications