Feel the noise
Profoundly deaf percussionist Evelyn Glennie
Dame Evelyn Glennie has an office in a business park on the outskirts of Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire. It is obvious which of the nondescript buildings she inhabits because through the windows you can see enormous drums and curious instruments from the 2000-strong collection Glennie has amassed while establishing herself as the world’s leading solo percussionist.
Upstairs, past rows of xylophones and marimbas, cymbals and strange-looking musical-agricultural hybrids that have sprung from Glennie’s imagination, is her aluphone, a keyboard of 21⁄
2 octaves-worth of bells that she introduced to the world at the opening ceremony of the London Olympics.
She strikes one of the bells firmly with a mallet. The high sound rings in my ears but I ask Glennie, who is profoundly deaf, what she hears. ‘‘I’m not getting the ringing, but I get the impact,’’ she says. ‘‘Everything I strike, unless it’s very soft, that impact I absolutely get. What I miss is the pitch and the resonance.’’ She rolls her ‘r’s with a strong Scottish burr so that the word itself reverberates.
To carve out a career as a solo percussionist is one notable thing. To do so without a sense of pitch and only the vaguest sense of resonance is quite another. But here Glennie is, famous, fresh from being awarded the prestigious Polar Music Prize in June – considered the Nobel prize for music – and preparing for a return to the Proms this month. The Prom is being billed as a celebration of her 50th birthday, which was last month, but she says she is ‘‘not really one to celebrate birthdays’’.
In the citation for the Polar Music Prize, the Swedish committee said that Glennie had ‘‘widened our understanding of what music is and shown us that listening is only partly to do with our ears’’. President Obama sent his congratulations to Glennie and the other recipient, Emmylou Harris, saying that ‘‘music brings people together. It helps bridge differences, lift hearts and challenge assumptions.’’
Glennie is used to challenging assumptions. Deafness does not mean that you can’t hear, she likes to say, only that there is something wrong with the ears. She can ‘‘feel’’ low notes in her legs and feet and high sounds in her face, neck and, in the case of the note she has just struck on the aluphone, in her upper chest.
If you stand right next to her, listening to her play, you start to attune yourself to vibrations and to imagine how she hears with her whole body. You start to get a glimpse of how she works, but her journey to pre-eminence remains astonishing.
Glennie and her two older brothers grew up on her parents’ farm in Aberdeenshire. She began to lose her hearing when she 8 and by 12 was profoundly deaf. Glennie became an excellent lip-reader and when you talk to her the only hint of her deafness is if you say something when she can’t see your face and she asks you to repeat it.
She started playing percussion at 12 and owes her career to Ron Forbes, an inspirational music teacher whom she invited to the prize ceremony. ‘‘He didn’t take the stance, ‘She has hearing aids; we won’t bother with her.’ He said: ‘What can we do to include her and give her that opportunity?’ He started it all. That’s why I wanted him at the Polar Prize.’’
She rattles out a tattoo on her first snare drum, bought by her parents in a shop in Aberdeen while she stood in the corner and disobeyed their instructions not to peep.
‘‘This became almost like an extension of my body. I played it every morning at 6 o’clock, woke the whole house up. It just became part of me. I played it and played it until I left home at 16.’’
Glennie went to the Royal Academy of Music and decided to march to the beat of her own drum in every sense. ‘‘I think the journey I have had has been relatively unique because of the fact that solo percussion did not exist.’’ She would write to composers asking them if they would compose for her, blissfully unaware that they would require paying. In the early days she had to build consortiums to pay for compositions and relied heavily on Arts Council funds. The Arts Council purse may be considerably smaller these days but her reputation and clout opens many other doors.
More than 170 pieces have been composed for her and she hopes these will be central to her legacy. ‘‘It’s crucial, crucial, crucial for me when I amlong gone that all of this repertoire continues to be played; that promoters continue to believe in percussion; that institutions believe in the importance and impact of what sound means and don’t just categorise people so that if you are deaf then you can’t hear and therefore music isn’t for you. That is absolutely not the case.’’
She first played at the Proms in 1989 and performed the first percussion concerto to be heard there in 1992, James MacMillan’s Veni, Veni, Emmanuel. ‘‘That gave the Proms faith in percussion. The audiences [at the Proms] are so extraordinary. There is this openness and this wanting to share this celebration of new music.’’
The Proms concert at Cadogan Hall, her first at the festival since 2007, will feature the premiere of a piece for the aluphone by Bertram Wee and a piece she has cocomposed for the halo, a metallic hand pan. Sheets of the aluphone music are lying around but she says she is not ready to give me a preview.
She has worked with Bjork and Sting, but her hopes of collaborating with the rapper Eminem remain unfulfilled. Glennie has won three Grammys and her biggest audience was at the Olympics where she led hundreds of drummers in the industrial revolution section of the opening ceremony and then played Caliban’s Dream on the aluphone as the Olympic torch entered the stadium.
The Polar Music Prize award noted that her example had persuaded music schools to change their criteria when considering students. ‘‘It changed the mindset of the music institutions,’’ she says. ‘‘You couldn’t judge people on whether they had eyes, ears, whatever else [but] can they play?
‘‘More hearing-impaired youngsters are being involved in music but also promoters are more aware that they need to tap into the deaf communities and not forget about them.’’
She worries that most children don’t have the free instruction on an instrument that she did at school but says that, on the other hand, technology is creating opportunities in computer sound design. Doctors tell her they are seeing more young people coming into hospitals with hearing loss because they are pumping loud, highfrequency music into their ears. ‘‘Doctors are desperate to get that message out: think of sound as you would food. You are not going to eat 24/7 – you are going to feel ill.’’
While still performing regularly and planning numerous new projects, she has slowed from the pace of work that saw her performing 100 concerts a year in the early 2000s. ‘‘I was extremely concerned that I wasn’t enjoying the thing that once was my real love. But you have to reach that peak to know that that’s too much.’’ Now she won’t go away for more than two weeks at a time ‘‘and if it is longer than two weeks my partner comes with me’’.
Listening to a recording is almost like someone wearing a burka. You are missing a lot of the communication. Dame Evelyn Glennie
All she will say about her partner is that he is not in the music world. She was married to Greg Malcangi, a tuba player, for ten years but during the course of her divorce in 2003 excruciating personal emails emerged, revealing her affair with the married conductor Leonard Slatkin (‘‘I’ll nibble on your bits and byte’’, the maestro enthused, proving that he was better at expressing himself via Elgar than email). When I ask about the difficulties musicians have sustaining relationships when they are constantly travelling she says that ‘‘most people go through that journey’’.
Today her hair, which has been through a range of shades, is a distinguished silver. She is a pixieish 1.57 metres (5ft 2in) but has developed powerful upper body strength to master the huge variety of instruments she has collated.
‘‘I am a believer that if you purchase something or obtain something that you keep that for life.’’ The pieces here include a tray with metal prongs sticking out of it. ‘‘That was inspired by a piece of farming machinery my brother had that really vibrated. We work very closely with instrument manufacturers. Our minds are like sponges when we see something that we think might make a sound that is useful to us.’’
Glennie has made dozens of recordings but does not listen to recorded music for pleasure; she needs to feel and see live performances. ‘‘Listening to a recording is almost like someone wearing a burka. You are missing a lot of the communication,’’ she says.
I wonder if she ever dreams of her hearing being restored to the way it was when she was a young child. ‘‘I would be a very different person and I amnot sure I would really enjoy music as much,’’ she says.
‘‘The enjoyment I get is from participating. I have a very small listening repertoire. The actual creation of sound, just giving that sound, that’s where I get enjoyment.’’
The actual creation of sound, just giving that sound, that’s where I get enjoyment. Dame Evelyn Glennie