Good vibrations
Dame Evelyn Glennie is passionate about the benefits of listening to each other properly
Philip Rathmer
- Michael Hodges
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The remarkable achievements of Dame Evelyn Glennie, the deaf girl from rural Aberdeenshire who became one of the greatest percussionists in the world, make her an apt choice for Radio 3’s celebration of International Women’s Day. Just don’t ask her to knock men. “It was a man who, when I was 12, asked me to take my hearing aids out and place my hands on the wall,” she says, “and I’m forever grateful to him for that.”
That man was percussion teacher Ron Forbes and, by letting her pick up the vibrations of sound, he helped Glennie, who started losing her hearing aged eight, make a life-changing discovery – she could hear with her body. “I had felt that sound was becoming further and further away from my grasp, and now I was absolutely owning the space and the sound.”
Despite her hearing-loss, she went on to forge a much-lauded career, which has included two Grammys and, memorably, leading 1,000 drummers at the 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. “The career of a solo percussionist hadn’t existed before,” says Glennie. “So people were trying to grapple with that more than the fact that I was deaf. In a way, being female was the least of my issues.”
Listening isn't a luxury, it's a necessity
Percussion, she argues, is different from all other music-making because of its direct connection with our physical existence. “We literally start our lives with it, a little rattle or a little bell. We create percussive sounds with our voices to communicate with babies. And percussion can keep your body balanced as you get older.”
Growing older can offer more challenging problems, and through the Evelyn Glennie Foundation, she has worked with people living with dementia, taking instruments to care homes. One on one with participants Glennie uses a technique called receptive listening, where she says little but lets the patient interact on their own terms with the drum or other piece of percussion. “I almost act as a resonator, as a support system,” she says of encounters that can be profound when there is a reaction. “Then the engagement with the patient suddenly changes. That’s what listening does, it makes each person matter.”
Glennie is 59. Did the experience change her thinking about ageing and dementia? “Dementia scares me to death,” she says. “It really is a terrible thing that can happen, but I’ve seen it can be quite a beautiful thing when there’s care: and that care is literally about listening.” It’s something she thinks we should all attend to.
Evelyn Glennie performing at the London 2012 Olympics Opening Ceremony. Getty
“Listening isn’t a luxury, it’s a necessity. Just like food and water and a bed to sleep in. There is the necessity of listening when we have a newborn or we send the kids off to school, but we also really need to talk about listening in schools.”
We should all question, she says, the noise we live with and how it stops us listening to the world and each other. “How many computers do we have? How many cosmetically enhanced sounds do we expose ourselves to? How long has somebody been wearing earphones and listening to stuff just through their ears? What sounds can we get rid of?” Like her, we should feel things through our own walls.
Glennie knows the benefits that listening can bring in the most unlikely places, like Askham Grange women’s prison in Yorkshire. “I deliberately brought along very resonant [instruments],” she says of her time spent with inmates. “But also things that they could connect with their children through, because a lot of the inmates had babies or infants. But it wasn’t a music lesson. This was simply a listening experience and then a chance for them to express what that sound might have done for them.”
We can hear Glennie expand on her work in one of a series of talks, scattered throughout Radio 3’s International Women’s Day programming, which includes Jenni Murray’s Women Composers, a Sound of Cinema special, pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason joining Jess Gillam on This Classical Life, and a live Radio 3 in Concert celebrating women composers.
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Glennie has overcome so much, she’s confident that, with support, other female musicians and composers can, too. “We all have a voice and there needs to be a platform for that voice to be heard. But I’m very optimistic”.
Authors
Michael Hodges
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