Richard Elliott - Music Research Seminar, 28 January 2026

Date:28 January 2026 |

Time:16:00 - 17:00

Location:G.09, Armstrong Building, Newcastle University

Research Seminar

Richard Elliott – ‘Songs and Objects: New Approaches to Music and Materiality’

Free admission

This presentation introduces my ongoing Songs and Objects project, a space for exploring connections between music and materiality.

The project explores the many ways that songs connect to the object world: how songs bring evocative objects to life; how songs become evocative objects that accompany lifetimes; and how songs survive by attaching themselves to other objects.

It does this through a series of interconnected case studies that form the basis for a book manuscript and a newsletter and website designed as a form of public engagement.

In this talk, I’ll give an overview of the project and its motivations before offering a sample of the case studies I’ve been working with.

Examples include songs by: Ella Fitzgerald, Candi Staton, Holly Herndon, Richard Dawson, Björk, Blackalicious, Mary Chapin Carpenter, John Grant, Gram Parsons.

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 (2010)
Nina Simone (2013)
The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music (2015)
The Sound of Nonsense (2018)
DJs do Guetto (2022)

He has also published articles and reviews on popular music, literature, consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, language and technology. His current research focuses on the relationship between songs and objects. Richard is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University, where he specialises in courses related to popular music.