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.

This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.

Presented as part of UChicago Arts & Humanities Day. Learn more at humanitiesday.uchicago.edu.