Accomplished Musician Who is Deaf Teaching Others to
Listen
By Amy Halloran
Percussionist Evelyn Glennie is an ebullient performer.
The delight she takes in making music and exploring sound is apparent in
“Touch the Sound,” a documentary about her, and in other video
recordings of her at work.
Born in Scotland and based in England, she travels around
the world to play with orchestras, performs solo in concert halls and
improvises with other musicians in non-traditional settings, such as a
warehouse in Germany. 
“I hope that the audience will be stimulated by what
I have to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the
concert hall feeling entertained," Glennie wrote in an essay on hearing on her
Web site ( www.evelyn.co.uk ). "If the
audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then
I have failed as a musician.”
In a recent telephone interview, Glennie addressed
questions sent to her by e-mail, and her assistant silently repeated other
queries put to her so that she could lipread and respond.
Q: You began playing music before you
lost most of your hearing at age 12 and have described having a great awareness
of hearing as not being limited to your ears. Could you talk about your
openness to your changes in hearing? 
A: Obviously, I grew up hearing, so I
had a good appreciation, an understanding, of language and of music and of
playing by ear. Obviously, it was the Scottish traditional music I was very
used to watching and hearing other people perform, albeit on a very amateur
basis. Nevertheless, there was then an understanding of what sound was really
about as regards to being the age I was. From the age of 8 I began losing my
hearing, and by the age of 12 I was dependent on hearing aids. That was the
time I started timpani and percussion. With my percussion teacher at school, we
discovered (that), in fact, the whole body was like a huge ear, and together we
explored the development of that and literally were trying to hear less and use
the body like a resonating chamber. Of course, this basically happens as you're
thinking, and the way that you perceive sound, really think about the senses
and what you're capable of doing, and you sort of realize that all the senses
blur into each other; they overlap quite considerably.
Q: The childhood percussion teacher you
mention, Ron Forbes, was also terrifically open to exploring sound. Can you
describe his methods and how you grew up as a musician?
A: The methods that were used ... were
pretty experimental because, obviously, my percussion teacher had no idea what
to really do and neither did I, so we explored together. Some of the things
that we experimented with were, for example, putting the hands on the wall. The
teaching room is very, very small, and tuning two timpani to two different
notes, different pitches, I would have to describe where in the hand or in the
body I was experiencing those pitches. Gradually, the interval would become
tighter and tighter so that the intervals would become closer together, so the
differences would really be subtle. Then we concentrated on things like sense
of touch, which is probably the most important sense for musicians to develop,
hearing or otherwise. That became a key element for me to explore sound color
– you can play loud or soft, but what kind of loud do you want or what
sort of soft do you want? Do you want it to be a pleasant soft or a dissonant
soft or a fat soft or a thin soft or an aggressive soft? What kind of soft do
you want? And that was something that was very much explored through the sense
of touch. And then, of course, the eye, and the visual aspect, is extremely
important to link all of those things together, which is why I position the
instruments the way I do when I perform solo with orchestra, for example,
facing the conductor, more or less, where at least I'm able to see about
three-quarters of the orchestra, and they can see me as well. It's important
that they listen through their eyes as well.
Q: The Royal Academy of Music initially
rejected you because they couldn't imagine a career for a deaf musician. How
did you challenge that assessment?
A: The Royal Academy of Music in London
was in a unique position. They had never come across a hearing-impaired
musician before. Their instinct was to categorize this person, and their
challenge was to marry up someone, in their estimation, (who) couldn't hear
… with a profession that was dealing with sound. They couldn't bring the
two together, so therefore they simply felt that, no, it was not going to be
possible to create a career as a musician. Of course, the type of career that
90% of the people who at that time went through the Royal Academy ended up in
(was) orchestras, so they simply could not imagine this to be the case, and
that's why they declined my first audition. However, there was one person in
particular who felt that that really was not fair because I'd matched the
standards to get in, and so he insisted and persuaded the rest of the panel to
give me an unprepared audition, so I had to travel from Scotland again to the
Academy and take part in this totally unprepared audition. They found that I
still matched the standard and in a way was beyond that, and they could do no
more than accept me, so that's exactly what happened, so I spent the next three
years there.
(Note: Following Glennie's acceptance, the RAM changed its
admittance policies. That, subsequently, altered its student population so that
the composition of orchestras throughout the United Kingdom has become more
inclusive.)
Q: I've read that you dislike the
attention drawn to your hearing status. Do you feel the media misrepresent you?
A: The media is a kind of funny animal
at times. They often want short sound bites or short quotes or just short
statements to explain something that, in fact, is not easily explainable. So
yes, things can be quite dramatically misrepresented. That certainly had been a
huge frustration in the past. There's a big difference between stating that
someone might be severely deaf or partly deaf or totally deaf, and the age that
you may have begun losing your hearing, or something like that. All of these
things can be frustrating, not to mention the fact that they would like just a
simple sentence as to how you do something when, in fact, you've spent
practically most of your life trying to work out how to do something.
Definitely, it's been a frustration. Through the Internet we can be a little
more in control through Web sites and other means in order to explain certain
things, which is why the hearing essay on the Web site was pretty important to
do, to have up there for people to digest.
Q: You've described your job, in perhaps
a tongue-in-cheek fashion, as being teaching the world to listen. Do you have
ways to accomplish this mission in everyday, non-performance life?
A: The whole idea of teaching the world
to listen is interesting because it touches the heart of so many corporate
companies or individuals or in the work that I do as a musician. Sort of every
area of life that I deal with is about listening, and that doesn't mean to say
that we're listening to sound, it could be listening to a movement, it could be
just awareness or focus, a concentration, or something like that, and it's
really just making people aware of that. To do that, you just have to slow the
body down. In the world that we're living in at the moment, which is very fast
paced, there (are) layers upon layers which we have to digest in two minutes,
this type of thing -- it's really difficult to home in on the senses and what
they can actually do. The good thing about being a musician is that, literally,
you might be spending time with one particular sound, trying to perfect that
sound or play with that sound or trying to create different things, different
emotions, but in order to do that, you've really got to just blank everything
else out and concentrate on that sound and the projection of that sound and
really honor that. And so you've got to slow that body down. And that's really
what I'm trying to get across. I'm just sort of asking people to listen --
that's all it is. It isn't about whether you can hear well or at all. It's more
(about), "Are you prepared to listen to me?"
Q: You work collaboratively with other
musicians. Do you know if your collaborators approach working with you
differently than they might when working with other "hearing" musicians?
A: I've no idea whether the people I
collaborate with work differently than with hearing musicians. I don't really
feel that they are necessarily thinking about that. The important thing is that
we have to see each other, and that's probably the only difference there is.
That's such an important thing. Really, other than that, for me, I feel the
need to open myself up to them, their particular thoughts and interpretation,
to their particular personalities and characters that may come through the
music. This is all about teamwork, really, so likewise, a lot of times when I'm
collaborating with people, it could be the first time they've collaborated with
a solo percussionist, so that in itself is a challenge. Even before you start
thinking about whether they're working with someone who is hearing impaired or
is in a wheelchair or has one leg or whatever it is, you know, that's, in a
way, slightly irrelevant. We're both there for a reason. We're both there to
communicate through sound, and we have to make sure the teamwork, or the
chemistry, is there before anything else can be addressed. Once these things
are tapped into, everything else simply flows. It's a really great experience.
Amy Halloran , a writer, lives in upstate New
York with her sons and husband. |
