Song of the Glennie: Hearing Evelyn Glennie with more than just your ears

Feb 17, 2009

Author: Michael Bowen

Position: Staff Writer

Source: Inlander

Sit quietly in a room. The hum of the air conditioning — hear it? But don’t you also sense it, just a little, in your forehead? Or else someone calls from another room — the vibrations affect your neck, your sides. Or in the street outside, a truck rumbles by — that you clearly felt in your feet, your thighs. Hearing by the seat of your pants, you might call it.

That’s how Evelyn Glennie wants you to listen. Not just hearing with your ears, but listening with your entire body.

Vision and touch, as we all know, are complicated mechanisms involving brain, nerves, moods, levels of alertness. You don’t see with your retinas alone. Why should hearing be any different?

Overcoming the obstacles that faced a Scottish schoolgirl who wanted to study music in London despite a certain disability, Glennie has forged a career as the classical world’s most famous solo percussionist. She has become, in effect, a theorist of percussive sounds.

Yet she says that she would be content on a desert island with just a simple drum. And in a videotaped lecture, you can see why, as she varies the beating of her drumsticks — on the rims, on the skin, at different tempos, firm-handed and slack-handed, staccato and metronomic, syncopated and in unison.

And that’s just with a simple drum. Imagine what she’ll do on Friday night at the INB Center while performing the Percussion Concerto by American composer Joseph Schwantner (who taught in 1969 at Pacific Lutheran and won a Pulitzer a decade later). On YouTube, she booms her entrance, crashing the drum set. She caresses a shimmery hand-held gong, then races over to the marimba, her hands a blur as she taps out surprisingly melodic riffs. In quieter moments, she actually slides a violin bow on the edge of a kettle drum, caressing the metallic edges while tinkering with the timbales.

The INB Center will be filled on Friday with music educators in town for a regional conference. They’ll appreciate how Glennie was instrumental in getting the Royal Academy of Music to hear out auditions from applicants no matter what their disability — for Evelyn Glennie, now 43, has been profoundly deaf since she was 12.

Ever since, she’s been pounding on drums and gongs, listening to her sonic creations — hearing by the seat of her pants.

Dame Evelyn Glennie pounds the Spokane Symphony’s drums on Friday, Feb. 13, at 8 pm at the INB Center. Tickets: $20-$45. Visit spokanesymphony.org[3] or call 624-1200 or 325-SEAT.