Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Rather than merely shaking my hand, Evelyn Glennie gives it a vigorous rattle, as if curious to discover what sound it might produce. “I hope you haven’t been waiting long,” she says, although we are meeting a few minutes early. Glennie’s own hands, incidentally, seem surprisingly small. You’d hardly imagine they have spent the past four and half decades playing marimbas, drums, xylophones, timpani, glockenspiels or any of the multiple percussion instruments that she has mastered. Glennie was the first person ever to establish a full-time career as a solo percussionist. Now, at 59, she remains the most highly respected figure in the field, having been awarded a damehood in 2007 and appointed to the Order of the Companions of Honour in 2017.We are meeting at The Old Bridge, a cosy and characterful hotel restaurant in the Cambridgeshire town of Huntingdon. This is a rather liminal part of the world in which busy roads and junctions bisect expansive fields, but there is one big attraction: a short drive away is Glennie’s office, in which she has amassed more than 3,800 instruments, as well as other artefacts from her 40-year career. I’m hoping that, later this afternoon, she will take me there. First, though, there is the business of lunch to attend to, and right now it does feel very much like business. The Scottish percussionist, who mentions in passing that she doesn’t “mix work with pleasure”, comes across like the best kind of headmistress: upright in posture, neat in a black top and trousers, with impeccable manners and a sense of purposefulness. Her smile is warm — the kind that involves more of the nose and eyes than the mouth. But even the snare-drum roll of her “r’s” has something resolute about it. She used the ‘orchestra of sounds’ on the farmyard — ‘the livestock, the grain tower’ — as a training groundThe same could be said of her percussion playing, as well as her approach to life in general. In addition to giving solo performances with orchestras, jazz ensembles and contemporary groups, she writes her own music — including various percussion-based scores for film and television — and has contributed to multiple books and publications. She is also profoundly deaf, meaning that she can register sounds, but only at faint levels, and makes sense of speech by lip-reading.For this reason there is silence while we pore over the menus. But even once we have made our choices, nobody arrives to take our order. Tucked away in the quietest corner of the restaurant, we seem to be just out of the waiters’ orbit, and, while I am dithering over whether to remind them we exist, Glennie takes herself off to the central counter. “Excuse me, can we order please? That’s super. Thank you.” Within a few minutes we have our starters: a delicate wild mushroom risotto with aged parmesan and rocket for both of us.Glennie’s major breakthrough came in 1992, when she became the first person to give a performance of a percussion concerto at the BBC Proms. This was “Veni, Veni, Emmanuel”, a piece by the then 32-year-old Scottish composer James MacMillan, based on the Advent plainsong of the title. MacMillan wrote it specially for Glennie, consulting with her on the instrumentation and layout. The result is something immensely theatrical, whose battery of solo percussion includes tubular bells, tam-tams, snare drums, congas, timbales, gongs, woodblocks and marimba. At times its visceral energy puts one in mind of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. At others it is delicate and ethereal. As Glennie puts it herself: “It has this combination of religious depth and physicality.”Earlier this month, Glennie reprised the work at the Brighton Dome. How has her approach to it changed over the decades? “When you’re a young musician you have an infectious energy and freshness, as well as a feeling that you’re promoting your instrument. Nowadays, however, I feel that I don’t have to add anything to the work’s natural physicality. I’m almost simplifying the meal, as it were.” Instead, she wants to focus on “finding a new layer [to the piece], to keep peeling the onion and finding something else”. That aversion to complacency is characteristic of Glennie, who says that, even as a child, “I never had to be forced to practise and never had to be forced to do my homework.” Growing up on an Aberdeenshire farm, Glennie and her two older brothers were expected to help their parents with farming duties. “I loved working with the animals. It was my job at lambing time to look after sick lambs,” she says. “And I was just a complete shadow of my dad. He would be putting silage in the barrow and I would be putting silage in my tiny wooden barrow. I would follow him everywhere.” Was he musical? “He played the accordion but never in front of us. He would always say, ‘My fingers are too stiff.’ He was a very modest man. A gentle man.”Glennie’s first steps into the world of music were self-motivated: “I started tinkling around on the piano at home.” But at eight, just around the time when she was starting piano lessons, Glennie’s hearing started to deteriorate as a consequence of mumps. By the age of 12, when she fell in love with percussion (“I saw it in the school orchestra and thought, wow — that looks amazing”), she was almost completely deaf. Yet she persevered with musical studies, going on to apply to, and be accepted at, the Royal Academy of Music.What gave her the determination, she says, was the joy she took in music: it became her refuge at a time when “being in the playground or the classroom was becoming more and more difficult” and she was “beginning to lose confidence”. But what allowed her to take her playing to such a high level was an open-minded percussion teacher. “He told me to take my hearing aids out and place my hands on the wall while he struck the timpani, so that I could feel [the vibrations].” It was a revelation, and gradually Glennie learnt how to distinguish sounds through their resonances, using the “orchestra of sounds” on the farmyard — “the livestock, the grain tower” — as a training ground. What emerged was a whole new understanding of sound as a multi-faceted entity — one that she remains committed to. Gesticulating animatedly over her half-eaten risotto, Glennie laments that music lovers “don’t always spend enough time asking ‘what is our art? What does it consist of?’ We hear something and say that’s nice or not nice. We simplify things.”What could be achieved if we didn’t? “When you really dig down into the topic [of sound], you enter into the physics of sound, into the creative aspect of it, the history of it, the visuals of it, the language of it.” And harnessing any of these, she argues, could give “people what they need to give them the freedom to be creative”.For people who have conducted their lives reacting to situations and getting into trouble, just imagine what it’s like . . . [when] you strike an instrument and it resonates for 30 seconds. And you just waitBy “people”, does she mean professional musicians? To an extent, she says, insisting that all musicians — even those with fully functioning ears — would do well to focus on the resonance of sound. But she also recalls visiting HMP Askham Grange, a women’s prison in Yorkshire, where, in partnership with the National Literacy Trust, she spent time with inmates earlier this year, exploring aspects of sound, including resonance and colour: “For people who have conducted their lives reacting immediately to situations and getting into trouble, just imagine what it’s like to have this conversation where you strike an instrument and it resonates for 30 seconds. And you just wait.”One of her next goals, she says, is to explore similarly innovative methods of improving integration between disabled and non-disabled musicians. Does she have any idea of how this could work? At this question she brings up the BBC TV show Strictly Come Dancing, which this year introduced its first blind contestant, the comedian Chris McCausland (who, shortly after we meet, emerges as the competition winner): “I’m fascinated by how his partner will be directing, choreographing and using language that will be pertinent to Chris’s situation when he isn’t able to see [her] movements . . . I think that all creative disciplines would do well to think about this. It has to start somewhere.”Our main courses arrive. Glennie’s is an artistic arrangement of pan-fried bream fillet with sautéed potatoes, wilted spinach and lemon and caper butter. I, meanwhile, have opted for braised featherblade of beef with rosemary confit potato, tenderstem broccoli and celeriac remoulade. Both look as though they will melt in the mouth, but, as with her starter, Glennie holds back to concentrate on the conversation. Which seems appropriate since we are now discussing the nature and importance of listening: a subject that has preoccupied Glennie since she lost her hearing. It’s a theme that she explored in some depth during the pandemic, having launched The Evelyn Glennie Podcast early in 2020, interviewing guests from all walks of life about their experiences of listening. The results were fascinatingly varied. In one episode the comedian Bill Bailey delved into the psychology of reading and reacting to his audience members when they didn’t laugh. In another, three doctors explained how telemedicine had shifted their focus from visual diagnostic clues, such as body language and gait, to verbal information shared by patients. But, between all the guests’ contributions, it was hard to get a handle on Glennie’s own definition of listening.So what is it? “Very simply, listening is presence. It is the here and now. It is paying attention. It’s also a kind of tolerance — the ability to give somebody a chance without thinking, ‘Oh, no, not them again.’” It is, she says, “unbelievably simple in concept, something that we can all do and yet we don’t do it to our fullest ability”. Was there a time when we were better at it? “Yes. Far, far better,” she says, “Just think about how people used to listen to the environment for survival, how they listened using distance and space.”One of the obstacles we face today, she continues, is the omnipresence of distractions: “I think we are living in a much more visual world . . . When we have nothing to do, we get on our phones . . . and social media provides such a loud reading environment. It’s quite nauseating.” But, she says, there’s something else at play: the pace of modern-day life. “It’s striking that for people who have a terrible illness, and know they have a fixed amount of time left, listening becomes razor sharp because they cut away all the things that they don’t need to listen to. I wish it didn’t take such a traumatic time in someone’s life to be able to do that.” She sums up: “Nowadays we don’t have time and we don’t have space.”Perhaps we don’t, but Glennie seems more bothered by it than some. More than once during our conversation, she mentions that she finds noise unsettling. She admits that she doesn’t even engage with music at home unless she is practising, in order to avoid sensory overload. It is striking that this musician, whose name has become a brand, who plays what is perhaps the most extrovert group of instruments in the orchestra, seems to be such an introvert.Our waiter returns with two glistening sticky toffee puddings and Glennie’s eyes light up: “I haven’t had one of these in a long, long time.” We dig in with relish, but face defeat within a few spoons. In an already decadent meal, it is one thing too many. And I sense that Glennie, who has passed little comment on the delicious food, is not one to overindulge. Last year the percussionist established the Evelyn Glennie Foundation, an organisation whose aim, as its website states so simply, is to “Teach the World to Listen”. “It’s not strictly a music foundation,” explains Glennie. “We are trying to connect with the medical profession, with the NHS, asking, ‘what is listening in sport? What is listening in business?’” Even by Glennie’s standards, this sounds like quite the undertaking, but she insists that it “isn’t a method or a system. Listening is all about making tiny, tiny changes.” It’s unbelievable that after everything we’ve gone through historically we are still in this position where we cannot communicate with each other without picking up a weaponWhat kind of changes? She cites a project that took place last year in which young carers aged from eight to 17 shared the stories of their lives, and described the emotional toll that their responsibilities had taken on them. “Then we worked together [to create] a piece of music . . . finding sound frequencies or resonances that connected with them: the sound of responsibility, the sound of loneliness, the sound of authority, the sound of decision, or the sound of being completely and utterly unsure.” This kind of work, in her opinion, engenders what is perhaps the most crucial aspect of listening: “allowing everybody to have a voice, then allowing a bit of reflection before the conversation continues”. She elaborates: “You can disagree with someone to the nth degree, but listening will bring respect.” She insists that this issue has wider significance in the context of current conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East: “No matter which way you swing [politically], it’s unbelievable that after everything we’ve gone through historically we are still in this position where we cannot communicate with each other without picking up a weapon.”But how much can initiatives such as the foundation realistically contribute to this situation? “We do what we can,” says Glennie with a smile, before concluding: “If we can create a culture of listening . . . where it’s shown to make a difference early on, even at school, then that would be fantastic.”We leave the restaurant and Glennie drives me to her office, which is in a soulless business park. From the outside it looks unremarkable, but then I walk in and see something you’ll find in no other office: one of the world’s biggest timpanis. Upstairs, I find all sorts of treasures: the African drum on which the British percussionist James Blades recorded Morse code representing V for victory as an introduction to BBC broadcasts during the second world war; a keyboard instrument of aluminium bells that Glennie first presented to the world at the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics. Glennie explains that the collection’s function is largely educational, catering even to those “who might not be interested in percussion, but are interested in geography, history, the physics of sound, language, or whatever it might be”.But I also get the sense that, contained within these walls, is some clue to the emotions that this humane, dignified musician doesn’t wear on her sleeve. On one shelf lies the first drum she ever received, aged 12. On another lies her late father’s accordion (“It’s literally the only thing I have of his”). And, leaning against a wall, a rack of costumes and concert outfits that she has worn over the years, including, rather surprisingly, the wedding dress from her marriage to her former husband, a tuba player. “Stories are important,” murmurs Glennie, as we descend the stairs. “Stories and histories.” Then she drives me to the station and, all business put aside, quickly hugs me goodbye. Find out about our latest stories first — follow FTWeekend on Instagram and X, and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
