Breathing Room: On Bob Dylan’s Harmonica

Associate Professor Steven Rings previews material from his new book What Did You Hear?: The Music of Bob Dylan. Steve will discuss the one instrument that necessarily stops the flow of Dylan's celebrated lyrics: the harmonica. As we will hear, this instrument creates “breathing room” in Dylan’s songs, a space to focus on sounding breath free of the word. In that breathing room, without the shiny objects of Dylan’s words to distract us, we can hear much: history, identity, emotion, and a kind of non-verbal eloquence—sounds that approach the condition of words, only to recede again into semantic indeterminacy.

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