US country singer Emmylou Harris and Scottish virtuoso percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie were named on Tuesday in Stockholm winners of the Polar Music Prize, considered the Nobel Prize of music.
"No one in the history of popular music has harmonized like Emmylou Harris ... The music of Emmylou Harris contains the history and spirit of the entire American continent," Efe news agency quoted the jury as saying.
Regarding Glennie, who went deaf at age 12, the jury said: "She has widened our understanding of what music is and shown us that listening is only partly to do with our ears ... Evelyn Glennie shows us that the body is a resonance chamber and that we live in a universe of sound."
Harris, the 67-year-old Country Music Hall of Fame inductee since 2008, has released over 25 albums, sold more than 15 million copies, and won 10 Grammy Awards throughout her career that spans over four decades.
As for the second recipient, Glennie, 49, starred in 1992 in the first percussion recital in the history of the prestigious BBC Proms music festival, as well as other concerts all over the world, in addition to having recorded around 30 albums.
The two winners will receive the Polar Music Prize money worth nearly 110,000 euros ($118,000) on June 9, 2015, in Stockholm.