World Music Moment

In this new series I share with you my love of World music!

Being an English speaker, I mainly listen to, and was brought up with, music sung in the English language. I have always been fascinated however by the rhythms, language and variety of musical sounds from all over the world.

There is something universal about music that transcends language, time and culture.

My native tongue is a language whose expressive nature fits well for lyric writing, thus being a favourite with songwriters, and has been a prominent language of popular music in the last century for songs across the globe.
In English speaking countries however it is less common to find songs in other languages entering the main music stream. There are always exceptions of course!
Classical music lovers will regularly listen to lyrics sung in a variety of different languages.
The Celtic music scene utilises the Celtic languages of Irish, Scots, Welsh, Cornish and Breton along with the English. Traditional songs from many countries are sung in ancient languages such as Latin or Sanskrit.

All the songs I will include in any World Music Moment post are all songs I love. I do highly recommend you searching out the artists and the albums they have created.

Today here we have songs in French, Irish Gaelic and Turkish.


French

Raphael - Peut-être a-t-il rêvé?

Raphael is a singer, songwriter and musician from France. I have enjoyed the album 'Caravane' that this song is taken from since its release.






Irish Gaelic

Solas are an Irish-American band of mainly Folk-style music. The beautiful voice of singer Karan weaves throughout this tune.

 Solas - A Chomaraigh Aoibhinn O


 



Turkish


 maNga - Beni Benimle Birak 

maNga are a Turkish Rock band who mix rock music and rap styles. The band were the Runners--up in the 2010 Eurovision Song Contest with their song 'We could be the same'.

Emma Watson Speaks at UN for gender equality

British actress Emma Watson, the newly appointed Goodwill ambassador for UN women, recently gave a powerful and informative speech on gender equality, feminism and men and women's rights in the modern day world. She was promoting a new campaign by the UN called HeForShe.
This is the first campaign of its kind by the UN and aims to not only gain awareness but enable true action to be taken to create gender equality all over the world. And it's a worthy idea to get behind.

 An interesting point from Ms Watson's speech was :-

 That there is as yet no country in the world that has full gender equality.

I was rather shocked by this current fact! This campaign I feel really puts a clear message out there that gender equality isn't only about women. Discrimination of women affects men's lives too.

 From the 'He For She' action kit :-

"We all benefit socially, politically and economically from gender equality in our everyday lives. When women are empowered, the whole of humanity benefits. Gender equality liberates not only women but also men, from prescribed social roles and gender stereotypes."


Watch Emma Watson's UN speech below :-


 


Campaign website :- www.heforshe.org 

Twitter Tags #HeforShe  @UN_Women  @HeforShe 

Facebook page here