Polar Music Prize to Emmylou Harris and Evelyn Glennie
The motivation for Evelyn Glennie
The Polar Music Prize 2015 is awarded to percussionist Evelyn Glennie from Aberdeen, Scotland. Evelyn Glennie, who has been deaf since the age of twelve, has a mission to teach the world to listen. She has widened our understanding of what music is and shown us that listening is only partly to do with our ears. Everyone, whatever their physical circumstances, can
perceive and perform music, can feel and convey good vibrations. We all have our own, individual tone. In her home country of the United Kingdom, she has changed the criteria for acceptance by music schools, has been honoured by the Queen for her efforts and had a key role in the opening of the Olympic Games in London in 2012. As a musician, she is one of very few who have successfully made a career as a solo percussionist. She has played with the world's foremost orchestras, conductors and artists and has released more than 30 solo albums. Evelyn Glennie shows us that the body is a resonance chamber and that we live in a universe of sound.
The motivation for Emmylou Harris
The Polar Music Prize 2015 is awarded to the artist Emmylou Harris from Birmingham, Alabama. No one in the history of popular music has harmonised like Emmylou Harris. For five decades she has embellished other artists' recordings by adding vocal parts that did not exist in the melodies. But it is as an artist in her own right that she has made the greatest contribution. The music of Emmylou Harris contains the history and topography of the entire American continent. Her voice follows the contours of the American landscape, from the highest peaks to the endless prairie. Weather, soil and colour, it can all be perceived in her music. As she sings in one of the best of her own compositions, she is a red dirt girl from a red dirt town. Emmylou Harris has also used her position as a musician to work for feminism, animal rights and the care of people affected by war. Emmylou Harris makes the world bigger and smaller, more valuable and more beautiful.