I’ve contributed a chapter to the newly published Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon. My chapter is entitled ‘Sounding Out Popular Music HIstory: A Musicological Approach’.
SUMMARY: While the relationship between musicology and history has shifted considerably over time, the importance of each discipline to the other remains vital. This chapter argues for a way of doing popular music history that proceeds from and reflects on musical objects, specifically sound recordings. Recordings, it is argued, afford unique insights into the popular past while constantly posing questions relevant to the present. As objects with particular roots and multiple routes, recordings encourage critical reflection on time and distance in the mediation and remediation of musics from other places and eras. In order to illustrate this, the chapter presents three strands of historical practice related to popular music and sound recording. One strand examines recordings of the past as ways of illustrating broader scholarly concerns such as nation, empire and postcolonial struggle. A second engages with phonography, posing questions about fidelity, authenticity and representation. The creative practice of those involved with phonographic archaeology – crate diggers, collectors, DJs, producers, compilers and reissue labels – constitutes a third strand, which may welcome or reject historical musicology yet which still offers a way of doing history sonically. After discussing these strands, I reflect on the role of storytelling in musicological work.
Fifty years ago today, Nina Simone and her band performed at Westbury Music Fair in New York. Three days had passed since the murder of Martin Luther King and Simone used her concert to stage an act of collective mourning and outrage. Below is a re-post of a 2013 entry from my blog So Transported: Listening to Nina Simone, in which I reflect on three of the songs performed that day.
‘Why? (The King of Love is Dead’, Nina Simone’s haunting tribute to Martin Luther King, was one of a suite of songs performed by Simone and her band at the Westbury Music Fair in New York on Sunday 7th April 1968, shortly after King’s murder. Simone begins introduces ‘Sunday in Savannah’, the first song in what subsequently came to be known as “The Martin Luther King Suite”, by expressing surprise that her audience have turned up to the concert hall given the tragic events of recent days. “Happily surprised” that they have, however, she expresses hope that the evening’s performance can act as some sort of healing ritual, or working-through of the mourning process. An elegiac note is struck with the languid ‘Sunday in Savannah’, a song which bears no direct reference to King or his murder but rather imagines a peaceful continuation of everyday life in a religious community, a practice, it implies, which King should have been able to pursue instead of having to take up the fight against an unnecessary evil. The longing here is not for what was but for what might have been had historical circumstances been different, had humankind been more tolerant, or had the dream that King foretold come to pass into reality. The sense of harmonious continuity is emphasized in the musical accompaniment by the organ (played by Simone’s brother, Sam Waymon) and by the lightest of touches from piano, guitar and drums. Only at the song’s culmination do voice and piano become discordant and harsh, as Simone substitutes “Atlanta” for “Savannah”, invoking King’s home town and pointing out “it’s the same thing, same State, same feeling”.
‘Why? (The King of Love Is Dead)’ was a song written by Simone’s bassist Gene Taylor in response to King’s assassination. As Simone says at the outset, the band had had just one day to learn it and the performance subsequently seems to veer between the rehearsed and the improvised. ‘Why?’ has made various appearances on record and CD, initially appearing in edited form on the RCA album ‘Nuff Said (1968) and later being partially restored to its original version as part of the “Martin Luther King Suite” on the compilations Saga of the Good Life and Hard Times and Sugar in My Bowl. The full, unedited version can be heard on the compilation Forever Young, Gifted & Black (2006) and begins in a quietly elegiac tone as Simone introduces the song. Taylor’s suitably epic opening – “Once upon this planet Earth” – sets the tone for a reverential account of King’s life, work and dreams. To begin with, Simone stays clear of militancy as she emphasizes King’s Christian message, the tragic sacrifice he was forced to pay and the possibility that he might have died in vain. Lateness is the song’s keynote: King’s lateness, Simone’s growing sense of lateness (which would transform itself into a perpetual process of mourning) and a general sense of lateness and loss for the civil rights movement. In one of the many unanswered questions of the song, Taylor and Simone ask “is it too late for us all?”
‘Why?’ can be heard as a motivated act of remembering, wondering and yearning. As remembrance the narrative is not inaccurate but, as with many elegies, accuracy is less important than the act of recalling a person’s life and its meaning for a wider congregation. ‘Why?’ acts as a song of wonder and yearning simply through its positing of childishly simple, yet difficult-to-answer, questions. Why does it have to be this way? Why can’t things be different? The black female voice, which Farah Jasmine Griffin describes as one of the “founding sounds” of the USA, has often been called upon to provide solace in moments of historical rupture. It is also a voice that “expresses a quality of longing: longing for home, for love, for connection with God, for heaven, for freedom … a conduit between what and where we are and what and where we want to be”. As with the musical role models amd social movment spokespeople discussed by Ron Eyerman and Andrew Jamison, it is clear that Simone needed to offer a response to the tragedy of April 4 and that those affected by the tragedy needed to hear from an artist of her stature, ability and socio-political position.
But ‘Why?’ does not consist solely of questions. To be sure, it manifests one of the commonly understood phases of mourning in its bewildered and uncomprehending ‘whys’, in its pain and numbness. But it also enacts another phase of mourning by showing anger and a refusal to accept what has happened. After seven minutes of Taylor’s elegiac gospel song (closer, perhaps, to the kind of “sorrow songs” discussed by W.E.B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk), Simone and the band start to raise the volume and the singer’s voice takes on a harder edge as she poses a new question: what will happen in the cities now that “our people are rising”? Utilizing some of the stop-start drama of her reading of ‘Pirate Jenny‘, Simone brings the searchlight of her voice to flash on “that moment that you know what life is”, a moment of decision – an event – where the attainment of a new, more meaningful subjectivity is recognized, a commitment and fidelity that can survive even death. To a dramatically rolling piano accompaniment, Simone testifies that “you know what freedom is, for one moment of your life”. As she returns to Taylor’s lyric – “what’s gonna happen / now that the King of Love is dead?” – the song takes on a new, less fatalistic, more assertive dimension, no longer a question raised to a cruel God, but rather a threat and prediction of “the fire next time“.
During the song, Simone also takes the time to reflect on the loss of other role models and cultural beacons: “Lorraine Hansberry left us … and then Langston Hughes left us, Coltrane left us, Otis Redding left us. Who can go on? Do you realize how many we have lost? … We can’t afford any more losses. … They’re shooting us down one by one.”
Perhaps not surprisingly, Simone also used ‘Mississippi Goddam‘ in her Westbury concert to comment on King’s murder and to connect it to other incidents, not least the church bombing that had inspired the writing of the song. At one point she replaces “Tennessee” with “Memphis”, a reference to the city where King was shot; later, calling upon the audience to join her in song, Simone shouts “the time is too late now … the King is dead!” As if it were not clear that ‘Mississippi Goddam’ is delivering on the threats hinted at in ‘Why?’, Simone declares “I ain’t about to be nonviolent honey!” Unlike the version of the song immortalized on the In Concert album, here it is Simone who is laughing. Her laughter seems as strange and out of place as that of the audience in the earlier version but we should probably hear it as an illogical response to an illogical and impossible situation.
I’ll be presenting my current research at the Rethinking Sound conference in Seoul later this week. My current project explores the materiality of song and the relationship between songs and objects. As this is a sound studies conference, I’m using this paper to think about how my project intersects wtih the theories of Pierre Schaeffer and those influenced by his work on acousmatic listening, sound objects and the ‘thingness of sound‘.
The second half of the paper is taken up by a discussion of Björk and the ways her music gets connected to objects of various kinds: natural, technologcal, human, nonhuman, viral, meteorological. I’d already been planning to include references to the work of Kaitlyn Aurelia Smith and Jlin, so I was delighted to learn last week about the new remix that Jlin has made of Björk’s ‘Arisen My Senses’. I love the way she makes it almost unrecognisable (as a Björk song, that is: it’s very recognisable as a Jlin song) while still retaining important aspects of the original vocal timbre. Jlin’s remix is the second on the Spotify playlist below; the original can be heard on last year’s Utopia.
My absract for the conference:
Recent years have witnessed an intense interest in the roles played by objects in the world, with many approaches recognising the vital interdependence of human and non-human actors. My current research aims to establish the importance of music (and sound more broadly) in this new terrain of scholarship by analysing how songs represent objects, how songs themselves become meaningful objects and how songs rely on a wide range of ever-changing objects to assure their survival. Using the connecting thread of materiality, I propose an approach to musical analysis that both connects with recent object-centred scholarship and overcomes existing musicological distinctions between music as thing and music as process.
This paper presents an analysis of the ‘song object’, a concept crucial to my research and which has connections to earlier theories of lyric substance as well as to Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore (sound object). What constitutes the song object? What kind of object is it? How do songs themselves comment on their construction, their parts, their physicality? I argue that songs are a particular kind of technology for ordering information and that they deploy particular technologies of object orientation in ways distinct from, but comparable to, those of paintings, sculptures, poems and books. Part of my analysis therefore consists of exploring material descriptors and metaphors connected to song, incorporating the artificial (hooks, bridges, etc.) and the natural (cells, viruses, weather systems). I’m interested in what these terms – and their application to song objects – can tell us about the materiality of sound.
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a journalist who had seen that I’d written a book about Nina Simone and wanted to get some thoughts from me about Simone’s October 1969 live recording of ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life’, the one that ended up on the 1970 album Black Gold. I sent some thoughts, which were received warmly and which I assumed would be quoted, at least in part, in the published piece. In the end, none of my words were used, so I’m posting them here. In the absence of any explanation, I’m assuming that the piece took a different direction from the original plan, or that there was some kind of editorial intervention. Not wishing to waste the effort, I’ve pasted what I wrote below, along with a playlist.
For me, ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life’ is about ownership and possession in two senses: the assertion of bodily presence and identity in the lyrics and Simone’s performance of other people’s material. The first type of ownership is laid out explicitly in the lyrics of the song through the first section detailing what the singer hasn’t got and the second section confidently and hopefully asserting what she has. That Simone conflates what were two songs in the musical Hair into essentially one song is evidence of the second type of ownership: she makes this combination hers. In doing so, she connects the ‘got no / I got’ lyrics to a long tradition of black American vernacular song, a lineage that can be traced back to the classic blues queens of the 1920s (especially Bessie Smith, one of Simone’s great influences) and forward to the body-conscious identity-affirming music of contemporary artists such as Solange Knowles.
Bessie Smith, ‘St Louis Blues’ (1929)
Solange, ‘Don’t Touch My Hair’ (2016)
This story can be traced back further, of course, to spirituals and songs of slavery (songs about bodies whose ownership was in contest), but I generally hear Simone’s more physical songs (‘Be My Husband’, ‘Chauffeur’, ‘I Want a Little Sugar in My Bowl’, ‘Four Women’, ‘Backlash Blues’) as being part of a twentieth century tradition inaugurated by Bessie Smith and her contemporaries. Simone would complement the self-objectifying, explicitly physical lyrics of Smith and others with a performance style that emphasised physicality, often jumping up from the piano to dance, sway, clap, click fingers and shout. She would talk about how people in the black churches she attended as a child would get ‘possessed’ and ‘transported’ and this dynamic of being alternately in charge of and out of control of one’s body is manifested throughout Simone’s performing career. In capturing that essential dynamic in her captivating performance of a song written and performed by other people in another cultural context, Simone made ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life’ an assertion of her philosophy of life and music.
Following the audio trailer I posted for my new book The Sound of Nonsense, I’ve now made a video trailer too. This uses different examples from the audio taster but with the same aim of bringing together sources from literature, sound poetry, nonsense writing and pop music.
My new book is called The Sound of Nonsense and it’s published by Bloomsbury Academic today. To mark the publication, I’m posting an illustrated version of the book’s introduction below.
Introduction
‘Watch the sense and the sounds will take care of themselves’; so says the Duchess in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.[i] But can we be so sure of this? The Duchess, like her creator Lewis Carroll, seems to put more emphasis on the sound of words than their sense. This aspect of her character that has been much remarked upon, not least by those interested in the role that sound plays in creating meaning and nonsense.[ii] As some of Carroll’s readers would have known, he himself was playing with sound when he placed these words in the Duchess’s mouth; her ‘moral’ is based on the English proverb ‘take care of the pence and the pounds will take care of themselves’. It is only one of many instances in Carroll’s work where the work of nonsense – what Marnie Parsons has called ‘nonsense strategies’ – relies on sound to do its business.[iii] This book responds to that reliance by highlighting the importance of sound in understanding the nonsense of writers such as Carroll and Edward Lear, as well as James Joyce, before connecting this noisy writing to works which engage more directly with sound, including sound poetry, experimental music and pop. By emphasising sonic factors, I try to amplify the connections between a wide range of artistic examples and to build a case for the importance of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting meaning.
Nonsense literature, particularly that associated with the English tradition made famous by Carroll and Lear, has generated a rich and varied body of study in a variety of disciplines, including literature, linguistics, art history, philosophy and psychology. Much of this exegesis has focussed on questions of meaning and the ‘logic of sense’ or on questions of normality and abnormality. Invariably focussed on words and sentences as they appear on the page, few studies of nonsense take sound as their primary analytical perspective. I take this gap as my starting point and, while engaging with many of the other things that have been said about my chosen examples, I hinge my study on the sonic dimensions of nonsense. The first chapter offers an overview of some of the ways in which nonsense has been approached, noting the difficulties in defining terms and agreeing on boundaries. By way of my own definitions I suggest types of nonsense that bind the diverse examples to be found through the rest of the book. I also start to offer observations on the role of sound in creating, maintaining and disrupting sense.
The second chapter is focussed on the resonance of the page and, in addition to nonsense literature, includes discussion of modernist literature. More work has been done in recent years on the role of sound in modernist writing – particularly James Joyce – and my aim here is to highlight sounds which are pertinent to a discussion of nonsense and to set up connections with music, for example by considering how the work of writers such as Carroll and Joyce has been auralised or musicalised.
Having established the importance of sound on the written page, the book moves to work that more directly challenged the written dimension of literature by engaging with sound as a primary text; examples include artists and theorists associated with a variety of European art ‘movements’ (futurism, Dada, surrealism), sound poets such as Hugo Ball, Henri Chopin and Bob Cobbing, and the audiovisual cut-up experiments of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs. Here I’m interested in sonic challenges, be they chopped audio or sonic palimpsests, and the efforts required to get at meaning.
One of the aims of the book is to show connections between modernist, avant-garde or experimental artists and those more associated with popular culture, so, in keeping with a starting point of Carroll and Lear, the project also investigates the importance of nonsense sounds in popular music. Chapter 4 – the longest – is devoted to popular music and the importance of nonsense in popular song, taking in scat singing, vocalese, doo wop, early rock ’n’ roll, yodelling, hip hop, singer-songwriters and artists who have created their own languages in which to sing. The relationships between words, sense and music are important here. One suggestion is that the shift from words to music is – from a linguistic perspective – often accompanied by a shift to nonsense, but that this linguistic nonsense becomes subject to another kind of musicalised sense-making. The process can also be witnessed in reverse; vocal sounds used to emulate musical instruments (e.g. in scat, doo wop or other mouth music) can be heard as proto-words and the point at which they are heard as such is what I call the nonsense moment. Nonsense functions in these instances as the overlapping territory between non-semantic vocables and clearly understood, meaningful words.
In tracing this trajectory, I am interested in how written, spoken and sung linguistic elements – predominantly words, parts of words and elements of phrases – create nonsense moments that rely on sound in one form or another. To make the kind of connections I am making between written and sonic texts requires an acceptance of the interrelationships between what Don Ihde calls ‘the word as soundful’ and ‘sounds as meaningful’:
The philosopher, concerned with comprehensiveness, must eventually call for attention to the word as soundful. On the other side, the sciences that attend to the soundful, from phonetics to acoustics, do so as if the sound were bare and empty of significance in a physics of the soundful. And the philosopher, concerned with the roots of reflection in human experience, must eventually also listen to the sounds as meaningful.[iv]
Like Ihde, I am interested in sound as it is experienced phenomenologically, although I mix this approach with awareness of intertextuality and intermediality. For me, the knowledge of a text’s precursors – and this includes one’s lack of, or partial, knowledge of them – are part of the phenomena available to the perceiving subject. This awareness, which I see as a grasping after meaning by a sometimes bewildered subject, is also what makes up the nonsense moment. This is the moment in perception when one is beyond, between or ahead of the moment of ascertaining sense. It is a glitch moment, a temporary period of blurring, the point in the process of code-switching where the codes are muddled.
Hopefully, the examples provided throughout the book will help clarify what I mean by this. I flag it up here, however, to anticipate some potential issues that readers may have regarding my definitions of nonsense, the ambitious scope of this short book, and the connections I am making between my various examples. I approach the issue of definitions and typologies of nonsense more fully in the next chapter. For now, it’s important to note that this is a book about nonsense, not solely about nonsense literature, though nonsense literature is a recurring presence. When it comes to nonsense and music, some may well take exception to scat, doo-wop or vocalese being referred to as nonsense because these vocal techniques have been categorised for musicology as musical, not verbal practices. My response here is to challenge such absolutist definitions of these musical processes and to ask instead why so many other people before me have made similar connections to mine. Were such listeners ‘wrong’ to do so? There is no hard and fast boundary between nonsense syllables used for musical effect and those same syllables used as words in a lyric. When Gene Vincent sings ‘Be-bop-a-lula, she’s my baby’, or when The Edsels sing ‘I got a girl named Rama Lama, Rama Lama Ding Dong’, how can we know if they are imitating instruments or referring to nicknames? The syntax of such utterances hangs in the balance.
Having given several spoken presentations on this project, I have been heartened by not only my audiences’ willingness to recognise many of the connections I am trying to make, but also the enthusiasm with which further examples have been offered. Given that I have had to severely edit the mass of examples I had already collected, it has been difficult to make space for many of these additions, but their existence reassures me that the concepts with which I’m dealing have resonance for others. If my selection of nonsense writers, sound poets and pop musicians is necessarily restricted to particular eras and genres, I trust that the points I am making can be applied by readers to other examples. I hope too that, just because there are many other examples from the history of literature and music that could be defined as nonsense according to my usage, my omission of them does not weaken my arguments.
When considering the scope of my project and the wide net I am casting, I have attempted to stay true to the objectives of the series in which it appears. One of these is to use a single concept to illustrate the interdisciplinary nature of sound studies. In my case, that single concept is nonsense but the perspectives and examples through which I approach the concept are designed to encourage interdisciplinarity. Another way of putting this is to say that I have attempted to make the book short but provocative, not seeking to answer all the questions it poses nor to lock down discussion of any of the areas it touches on. This is not a license to vagueness or lack of rigour, but rather a recognition that this book series sets out to offer something different to longer, specialist monographs.
I have wanted to respond to the vitality of nonsense and to revel in connections. Again, this may suggest a potential lack of historical or other contextual specificity to the examples cited. It may be felt, for example, that I enjoy listening for similarities at the expense of adequately exploring differences. I must admit to an enjoyment of staging my own Mad Hatters party, perhaps sitting Edward Lear next to Little Richard, Hugo Ball next to David Byrne, and Lewis Carroll next to Bob Cobbing and Ivor Cutler. But while I wish to at least imply a levelling process regarding the cultural provenance of my examples, I am never suggesting outright equivalency. As with many comparative methods, it is more about asking what light can be cast – what sound can be projected – by placing together the products of seemingly disparate cultural worlds. The artist Christian Marclay, responding to a question about the equivalence of objects placed together in some of his projects even when those objects have little relation to each other, makes the following observation:
But the reason they are together is to offer a third reading, totally disconnected from their initial usage. They tell a beautiful story together. Like if you’re writing poetry, you put together two words that rhyme or off-rhyme, and even though they may be unrelated, that rhyme is going to give the phrase a different weight. It kind of forces them together.[v]
Similar notions have been expressed through some of the other artistic processes I discuss in this book, such as the cut-ups of Brion Gysin and William Burroughs, the plunderphonics of John Oswald, and the ‘rhyming’ of doo-wop, country music and sound poetry undertaken by Paul Dutton. The idea is there, too, in the practices carried out by a whole host of DJs and other composers whose mixings, matchings and mismatchings provide the ideal soundtrack to mad tea parties.
Notes
[i] Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass, Definitive Edition, illus. John Tenniel, ed. Martin Gardner (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000), 92.
[ii] Mladen Dolar notes that the Duchess’s words seem to be inverted, for her pronouncements, like many proverbs, ‘make more sound than sense’; Mladen Dolar, A Voice and Nothing More (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006), 147. Marnie Parsons begins her exploration of ‘nonsense and sound’ by quoting the Duchess and suggesting she ‘was wrong, or partly wrong’; Marnie Parsons, Touch Monkeys: Nonsense Strategies for Reading Twentieth-Century Poetry (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 120.
[iv] Don Ihde, Listening and Voice: Phenomenologies of Sound, second edn (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 4.
[v] Christian Marclay, ‘Music I’ve Seen: In Conversation with Frances Richard’, in On & By Christian Marclay, edited by Jean-Pierre Criqui (London: Whitechapel Gallery, 2014) 85.
I have contributed to a programme on the song ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’, part of Radio 4’s series Soul Music. The programme airs at 9:00am on Wednesday 14 June, then again at 9:30pm the same evening; it will also be available to download on the Radio 4 website.
The song was written by Sandy Denny, who recorded it with The Strawbs, Fairport Convention and as a solo artist. It was made famous by Judy Collins’s 1968 cover and has been covered by scores of artists since. I first attempted to write about it when researching the music of Nina Simone, who recorded a haunting version in 1969. Hearing Simone’s rendition helped formulate my thoughts about the representation of time, age and experience. I included a comparison of the Fairport and Simone versions in my book Nina Simone. I then ended up writing about ‘Who Knows Where The Time Goes’ again as an essay for Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton’s collection Gender, Age and Musical Creativity, this time taking a slightly different perspective and also including discussion of Judy Collins’s version. Later, the song became the starting point for The Late Voice, my longest attempt to deal with the time/age/experience nexus.
It’s one of my favourite songs and I think about it differently each time I take the time to reflect on it again. So it was when I sat down in Newcastle’s BBC Studio to record my contribition to Soul Music, where I found myself emphasising aspects of the sound I’d never really tried to articulate before, such as the absolute vitality of Richard Thompson’s guitar in the Fairport version on Unhalfbricking, which I always heard as important but now hear as being an equal lead voice to Denny’s on that timeless recording. Now, as I write these words and think again about the song, I dwell on the way that the song itself models the passing of time (which admittedly, I’ve written quite extensively on before) and how that is best exemplfied in the way that the refrain’s most obvious rhyming words (‘knows’ and ‘goes’) are preceded by one and three words respectively, making an uneven and therefore memorable rhythm.
Perhaps finding something different to think about each time I reflect on the song maps onto the experience of time more generally: the recurrence of the familiar enhanced by the emergence of the hitherto unknown, or at least unformulated.
My article ‘Species of Sonic Spaces’ has been published in the new issue of Literary Geographies. This is a themed issue on the work of Georges Perec, inspired particularly by his classic 1974 text Species of Spaces.
ABSTRACT
Georges Perec’s Species of Spaces (1974) offers the author’s most explicit and extensive meditation on space understood as both everyday reality and source for speculation. The book is organised according to a ‘visualist’ logic and does not address sound as a way of understanding our environment. This article takes Species of Spaces as an invitation to consider ‘species of sonic space’, a variety of related chunks of the sonic environment we share. It asks how we might explore the sonic environment by way of Perec’s text and through consideration of other spaces which Perec does not discuss. It reflects on existing attempts to think of sonic spaces and on the differences between describing sonic, visual and other felt spaces. Aspects of Perec’s text lend themselves to comparison with other writers’ attempts to bring sound and space together: his analysis of domestic spaces can be usefully placed alongside Gaston Bachelard’s work on ‘the poetics of space’; his descriptions of urban rhythms can be compared to those of Henri Lefebvre; his attention to interiority can be considered in light of Peter Sloterdijk’s ‘microspherology’; and his division of space into species find a potentially productive aural analogue in Brandon LaBelle’s account of ‘acoustic territories’. These and other thinkers are considered here as ways of setting up an ‘auralisation’ of Species of Spaces. The role of sound in Perec’s A Man Asleep (1967), An Attempt at Exhausting a Place in Paris (2010) and Life a User’s Manual (1978) is also discussed. These works, it is argued, extend, develop, anticipate or reverberate with Species of Spaces in ways that are useful for auralising that text.
I’ve contributed a chapter to the newly published Routledge Companion to Popular Music History and Heritage, edited by Sarah Baker, Catherine Strong, Lauren Istvandity and Zelmarie Cantillon. My chapter is entitled ‘Sounding Out Popular Music HIstory: A Musicological Approach’.
I’ll be presenting my current research at the 
A few weeks ago, I was contacted by a journalist who had seen that I’d written a 
