The news that today is being celebrated as National Album Day has inspired me to post the following text on Nina Simone’s 1969 masterpiece Nina Simone and Piano! It’s a text that’s being lying dormant for a few years and now seems a good time to do something with it. The concept shouldn’t have been… Continue reading ppp: the personal, the political and the piano
Tag: music
New publication: Sounding Out Popular Music History
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… Continue reading New publication: Sounding Out Popular Music History
Nina Simone’s tribute to Martin Luther King – fifty years ago today
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:… Continue reading Nina Simone’s tribute to Martin Luther King – fifty years ago today
Upcoming Presentation: ‘From Sound Objects to Song Objects: Rethinking Sonic Materiality and Metaphor’
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… Continue reading Upcoming Presentation: ‘From Sound Objects to Song Objects: Rethinking Sonic Materiality and Metaphor’
Nina Simone’s ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life’
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… Continue reading Nina Simone’s ‘Ain’t Got No / I Got Life’
Book Launch
I'll be launching my book The Sound of Nonsense at Blackwell's in Newcastle upon Tyne on Wednesday 7 February. It's free but needs booking via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/richard-elliott-the-sound-of-nonsense-tickets-42589627723.
The Sight of the Sound of Nonsense
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. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HzDuLgPjeJw
The Sound of Nonsense
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… Continue reading The Sound of Nonsense
Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
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… Continue reading Who Knows Where The Time Goes?
The Late Voice now available in paperback
The paperback edition of my book The Late Voice: Time, Age and Experience in Popular Music has been published. In the eighteen months since the publication of the hardback edition, two of my major case studies have died (Ralph Stanley and Leonard Cohen), as well as two artists whose work had a profound influence on… Continue reading The Late Voice now available in paperback
Late Voice 