To be young is to throw one's body out into a time that is no time at all, but life, world, and space. Améry, On Aging, 15
Author: Richard
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) and 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.
Richard is Senior Lecturer in Music at the International Centre for Music Studies at Newcastle University, where he specialises in courses related to popular music. Prior to this he taught courses on popular music, contextual music studies, and music and media at the University of Sussex. He has also worked as a teacher of English for Academic Purposes, a journal editor and a reviewer of books and music. Find out more about his work at https://latevoice.com/
time gathered up
Those who say that even the young posess and know time, even though they thoughtlessly live for the future dimension, which is also time, such persons have never yet had the experience of feeling for themselves that time is nothing-but-time. This future into which the young tumble ... is, to be sure, not time at… Continue reading time gathered up
the quanta of the past
Grass has been growing over the entire past, which sudenly appears now to be leveled, no longer having any time value at all. Until - one usually discovers it with a blow - the displacement of the quanta of the past, which has continued to take place under the grass, becomes manifest: then the time… Continue reading the quanta of the past
like smoke in a strong wind
Time has passed, flowed by, rolled on, blown away, and we pass with it - what am I saying? - like smoke in a strong wind. We ask ourselves what time might actually be, about which we say that everything glides and runs by with it - ask ourselves with a tenacious naïveté that borders… Continue reading like smoke in a strong wind
what music has been doing
Is that what music has been doing all this time, making the extremities of human feeling tolerable, bringing them into line? Tone and cadence mark the limits of what can be supported. By following the note to the end of its journey you could even learn to disappear and love it. The truly exotic, the… Continue reading what music has been doing
dust
Dust is what connects the dreams of yesteryear with the touch of nowadays. It is the aftermath of the collapse of illusions, a powdery cloud that rises abruptly and then begins falling on things, gently covering their bright, polished surfaces ... Dust makes plapable the elusive passing of time, the infinite pulverized particles that constitute… Continue reading dust
Across the evening sky
the need for reflection, for making sense of our transient condition, is time's paradoxical gift to us, and possibly the best consolation for its ultimate power Eva Hoffman, Time (Profile, 2011), p. 11
I wish I had a heart like this. I wish I had that heart making circle after circle as when, in childhood, I sent stones skipping over the water, skipping over. The rest of your life is headed your way! Ko Un, 'At Eunpa Reservoir' (First Person Sorrowful)
Upcoming talk: Across the Evening Sky
I'll be presenting my paper 'Across the Evening Sky: Real and Anticipated Experience in Nina Simone's Late Voice' at the School of Media, Film and Music Research in Progress seminar, University of Sussex, on 13 February at 4pm. I gave a previous version of this paper at the University of Huddersfield's 'Gender, Musical Creativity and… Continue reading Upcoming talk: Across the Evening Sky
Late Voice 