WE’VE never had a percussionist in this alarming and vaguely deplorable series yet. Not sure we’ve had any dames either. Or deaf people. Apart from that we’re right diverse and inclusive, ken?
So, let’s bang the drum for Dame Evelyn Glennie, our first deaf percussionist, though she prefers to be known as a musician with a hearing impairment. Oakly-doakly.
More firsts: let’s bang the drum for Dame Evelyn Glennie, our first deaf percussionist, though she prefers to be known as a musician with a hearing impairment. Oakly-doakly.. She was first to perform a percussion concerto at London’s Royal Academy of Music, first to give a percussion recital and concerto performance at the Proms, and the first percussionist to be made a Dame Commander of the Controversial British Empire (DCCBE).
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OFF THE WALL
PRIOR to that, when she was just 27, she undertook the grave responsibility of being an Officer of Yon British Empire (OYBE). She was named Scotswoman of the Decade in 1990, and has more than 80 awards and 20-plus honorary doctorates to her name. Gonnae need a bigger mantelpiece, hen.
She was the youngest person ever elected to the Percussive Arts Society’s Hall of Fame. Evelyn Elizabeth Ann Glennie was also quite young when she was born on 19 July 1965 in Methlick, Aberdeenshire, the only daughter of her farming parents’ three children.
Mother was a church organist, father an accordionist in a Scottish country dance band.
But music wasn’t everything. Evelyn grew up weaning lambs and doing chores.
While still just a wee lass, she was struck by a neurological disorder and, by the age of eight, had started to lose her hearing – just after she’d started to play the piano. From piano, she graduated to clarinet but, when she was 13, an audiologist said it would no longer be possible to play any music and suggested, furthermore, that she moved to a school for the deaf.
However, deploying the “utter stubbornness and single-mindedness” that she identifies as a North-East trait, she decided to remain at Ellon Academy, where peripatetic percussion teacher Ron Forbes made one of those interventions that change lives.
Prior to meeting him, Evelyn had been getting “very, very angry” about her situation.
But, while she was trying to tune timpani, patient and sensitive Mr Forbes suggested she put her hands flat on the wall to feel the vibrations.
“I could feel the vibrations in my hands and lower parts of my legs,” Glennie has recalled, “so I got the pitch that way.” High sounds are felt in the body’s higher parts, low sounds in the lower, she explains.
Using her body as a resonating chamber, and aided by perfect pitch, she often plays barefoot during performances and recordings, feeling the music, and hopefully not any drawing pins, through her soles. Hey, it’s sole music! Apologies.
When she was 16, Evelyn auditioned for and was accepted by both the Royal Academy of Music and the Royal College of Music. She chose the former, despite its reported initial reluctance to interview her, and moved to yonder London.
While at the Academy, she won various prizes including the Queen’s Commendation for general excellence, and was soon the subject of a BBC documentary, A Will To Win, followed by Yorkshire TV’s Good Vibrations (also the title of her 1990 memoir).
She was a member of the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the Cults Percussion Ensemble, formed in 1976 by the aforementioned Mr Forbes. After graduating in 1985, she began playing professionally.
Now, she has dozens of recordings to her credit and has performed all over the world, at one point giving more than 100 concerts a year.
In 2004, she was the subject of Touch the Sound, an “arthouse” documentary by Thomas Riedelsheimer. Arthouse usually means nutty but Evelyn has described the film as an “explanation of sound”.
SWEET HARMONY
IN it, Glennie collaborates with English experimental musician Fred Frith and others, performing 100ft apart in an abandoned German sugar factory. Frith said it “was great visually, but limited in other ways”. In other words nutty.
Fortunately, it also followed Evelyn travelling from New York to Japan with a suitcase full of drumsticks. As she told the Scotsman in 2009: “My role on the planet is to bring the power of sound.”
Not only does she tour yonder globe as a soloist with various orchestras and musicians, she gives talks, presents podcasts and conducts masterclasses. She also engages in motivational speaking. I quite fancied giving that a go myself. However, in the end, I couldn’t be bothered.
Dame Evelyn plays the Great Highland Bagpipes and has her own registered stage tartan known as “The Rhythms of Evelyn Glennie”. She also has her own jewellery range, and has confessed openly to spending time metal detecting and poking around antiques fairs.
She’s a right collaborator, so to say, having worked with Björk, Steve Hackett, Bela Fleck, Bobby McFerrin, Fred Frith, Mark Knopfler, The King’s Singers, Kodō, Danny Boyle (London 2012 Olympic Games opening ceremony), the Royal Shakespeare Company (Troilus and Cressida), and experimental jazz – hmm, challenging – practitioners Trio HLK, to name but a few.
As well as a performer, she’s also a composer, “not with a capital C”, she says, but writing write music for television, radio and other media. This has afforded her opportunities to deploy some of the more unusual instruments in her 2,000-strong collection. Fair to point out this includes a twig, a string and a hollow wooden cylinder.
Dame Evelyn has commissioned a plethora of new percussion work and is a strong advocate of children’s music education. Her advice to young percussionists? “Do not get used to waiting for things to happen.”
AYE POD
IN 2021, she became Chancellor of Robert Gordon University and, in 2022, launched her own podcast, inviting punters from music, sport, television and academia to discuss their idea of listening and interpretation of sound.
Talk about multitasking. She has said: “As we live longer and (stay] healthier for longer, we need to keep ourselves busy.” Oh god, do we have to?
Despite her global profile, and living latterly in Cambridgeshire, her roots lie here in Daftieland. Scotland, she believes, “never ceased to amaze the world with its forward vision, bold action and great educational institutions”. I see. Is there another Scotland somewhere?
With commendable accuracy, the New York Times has described Dame Evelyn Glennie as “extraordinary”. The paper added: “One has to pause in sheer wonder at what she has accomplished.” Yep. Pausing even as we speak.
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