How Sound Feels to Musician Who Lost Her Hearing

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How Sound Feels to Musician Who Lost Her Hearing

September 7, 2005

By STEPHEN HOLDEN

"Hearing is a form of touch," the Scottish percussionist Evelyn

Glennie declares. "You feel it through your body, and sometimes it

almost hits your face."

Those words echo through "Touch the Sound," an impressionistic

documentary directed, edited and photographed by Thomas

Riedelsheimer. Subtitled "a sound journey with Evelyn Glennie," it is

a mystical exploration of the sensory world as experienced by a

renowned musician who lost most of her hearing by the time she was a

teenager. Expanding on Ms. Glennie's passionate assertion that

hearing is only the most obvious component of deeper physical

relationship between sound and the human body, the film is crammed

with striking visual correlations to the percussive vibrations she

conjures.

Every location visited by the film - from a Manhattan rooftop

swarming with pigeons, to a construction site, to the rocky Pacific

Coast, to the Scottish farm where Ms. Glennie grew up - reveals its

own percussive signature. In one of the film's most striking fusions

of sound and image, the camera looks up from below to study the

shadowy pitter-patter of pedestrians and their pets on a

semitranslucent walkway.

"Touch the Sound" follows the same rambling format as "Rivers and

Tides," Mr. Riedelsheimer's profile of the Scottish earthworks artist

Andy Goldsworthy, whose mutable sculptures in nature embrace the

concept of evanescence. Like Mr. Goldsworthy and like the great San

Francisco experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky, Mr. Riedelsheimer

is fascinated with the beauty of the fleeting moment and with what

Ms. Glennie calls "the sixth sense."

That sense, in her definition, is not an occult connection to the

spirit world, but her firsthand knowledge of how the loss of one of

the five senses is compensated by the heightened attunement of the

other four; that awareness used to be called synergy before the word

was hijacked by jargon-spouting corporate bloviators. Ms. Glennie, an

articulate, charismatic redhead, becomes vague only when trying to

philosophize about the opposite of sound.

Structurally the film might be described as a duet within a duet. As

the movie rambles here and there around the world, it periodically

returns to a loft in an abandoned German sugar factory where Ms.

Glennie and the British multi-instrumentalist Fred Frith are

preparing to record an album of improvisations. If their project

gives the film a center, it is only one aspect of a larger

collaboration between the filmmaker and the percussionist.

The film follows her from Germany to New York, where she delights a

small crowd in the middle of Grand Central Terminal by playing the

snare drums, barefoot, to a Japanese restaurant where she arranges

chopsticks, dishes, a glass and a metal lid into a makeshift drum kit

and gives an impromptu demonstration.

Visiting the family homestead tended by a brother, she recalls

being "Daddy's girl" and says she still harbors a special kinship

with her father, an accordionist who is no longer alive. At 8, she

says, she became aware of her progressive hearing loss. She had

intended to be a pianist but switched to percussion upon entering

high school. A gifted teacher advised her to remove her hearing aids

and learn to distinguish musical intervals by pressing her head to a

wall and feeling the percussive vibrations in her hands and arms. Out

of these experiences developed her sense of sound as a tactile as

well as an auditory phenomenon.

If Ms. Glennie declares her favorite instrument to be the snare drum,

it is the marimba on which she creates the film's most haunting

music. "Touch the Sound" concludes with a sustained meditation for

percussion and guitar, in which Mr. Frith, stationed on an elevated

platform on the other side of the room, elicits plaintive, shivery

cries from an electric guitar while Ms. Glennie taps out a deep,

quiet, musical prayer on the marimba. This is synergy of a high order.

.

Directed and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer; director of photography,

Mr. Riedelsheimer; music by Evelyn Glennie and Fred Frith, Roxanne

Butterfly, Horazio Hernandez, Za Ondekoza, This Mika, and Saikou and

Jason; produced by Stefan Tolz, Leslie Hills and Trevor Davies;

released by Shadow Distribution. At the IFC Center, 323 Avenue of the

Americas, at Third Street, Greenwich Village. Running time: 99

minutes. This film is not rated.

Copyright 2005 The New York Times Company Home Privacy Policy Search

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Edited January 18, 2007 by alocispepraluger102

[.:.impossible]

The Goldsworthy doc is beautiful. I hear a lot about Glennie from schooled percussionists, but I've never heard or seen her. This should be interesting.

Didn't Frith do the music for the Goldsworthy doc as well?

If you haven't seen that film, or don't know who Goldsworthy is, I would highly recommend finding a copy. Netflix perhaps? Goldsworthy is working on so many levels, it is incredible. Definitely a man in tune.

[GregN]

Very cool post. Thanks for sharing this.

g

[Joe G]

I saw this a few weeks ago, and highly recommend it. The performances with Frith were quite good. Search Evelyn Glennie on youtube; I think there may still be some clips from Touch the Sound.

Haven't seen the Goldsworthy doc yet, but I love his work as well.

[Tom in RI]

Here's a link to a story about a musician in similar circumstances who opted for implants. Meant to post it last week.

http://www.projo.com/music/content/Dickie_...HL.2d0fbc0.html