Singing Time and Singing Place

This presentation will look at performed and sung ballad texts in the light of Bill Nicolaisen’s ideas of time – performance, narrative, and historical – and place, beyond the beyond. Ballads and their performance express and encapsulate, ignore and elide time and place in dynamic, sometimes illogical ways, pulling and stretching realities to maximise impact. Using North-East ballads, I will explore some of the ways singers and composers use and are affected by these concepts.