Bob Dylan was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature this month. It’s great for the world to have the literary value of songs recognized. The more I work with songs from around the world, the more I see that many are poems set to music.
Only one other musician has ever been awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. That was Rabindranath Tagore in 1913. He’s was a Bengali artist, writer and musician from India. He was also the first non-European to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
You can listen to many of Dylan’s songs on YouTube
You can listen to Tagore sing one of his songs online.
You can also learn a song we recently posted on our India pages by Tagore called Phule Phule Dhole Dhole (A Touch of the Sweet Breeze). That piece was inspired by a Robert Burns’ song. Young girls in India dance to the song in recitals.
Viva la musica!
Mama Lisa
Photo of Bob Dylan at Massey Hall, Toronto, April 18, 1980, by Jean-Luc Ourlin, cc.
Photo of Tagore circa 1925.
This article was posted on Tuesday, October 18th, 2016 at 3:10 pm and is filed under Bengali, Bengali Music, Bob Dylan, Countries & Cultures, India, Languages, Music, Poetry, Poets, Rabindranath Tagore, Robert Burns, USA. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
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