Regarding Dame Evelyn Glennie in TOUCH THE SOUND

January 2006 the Austin Film Society presented TOUCH THE SOUND, a wonderful documentary looking at the life and art of the amazing percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie. Here is what I wrote about the film, which is now available on DVD.

TOUCH THE SOUND: A Sound Journey with Evelyn Glennie
Directed, photographed, and edited by Thomas Riedelsheimer, Germany/UK/Finland, 2004, 35mm, color, Shadow Distribution, 99 min.

Hearing is a form of touch. Sound comes to you. You can almost reach out to that sound and feel that sound. — Evelyn Glennie

World-class percussionist Evelyn Glennie and German filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer take us on an amazing visual and aural trip to New York City, Cologne, Japan, Scotland, California, and England. The centerpiece of the film is an improvisational concert created in an abandoned factory in Germany by Fred Frith, English experimental guitarist, and Glennie. The concrete and metal structure provides an amazing space in which to perform. Glennie, surrounded by various percussive instruments, and Frith, surrounded by his variously modified guitars, are a joy to watch and hear. Until this improvised concert, they had never performed together, but their musical spirits seem perfectly attuned as they create their transcendental duet. Fred Frith has a fascinating observation: “The narrative of improvisation is your whole life up to that point.” And what an amazing life Glennie reflects in her work. As the viewer/listener takes in her music, he/she completely forgets that Evelyn Glennie is 80% deaf.

Born in the northeast of Scotland on a farm in 1965, she was inspired by her musical father to try her hand at the piano. While she took up the instrument, she was beginning to lose her hearing, but, as she says, “When you are eight, you don’t think you are becoming deaf. You adapt accordingly.” By the age of eleven she was dependent on hearing aids. A doctor said that she wouldn’t be able to play music. Her father responded, “Hearing or not, she will do what she wants to do.” Fortunately her school had a very strong music department that allowed her to explore other instruments. Eventually she discovered the snare drum with which she revealed her true spirit. Sometimes putting her hearing aids aside, she learned that she could sense vibrations throughout her very being, different sounds creating a variety of sensations in various parts of her body. And she could feel those vibrations far longer than would people using their ears to catch the music. Suddenly the world of percussion opened up for the young musician. Two surfaces colliding in a repetitive tempo provided her an extremely enriched world. When she experimented with variations in tempo, pressure, angle, instruments, surfaces, and a variety of “strikers,” she uncovered an infinitely rich world of improvisation.

Riedelsheimer’s film is an amazing aural journey itself, discovering sounds everywhere, in both urban and natural spaces. In New York City, tires beat against the concrete pavement. A rhythmic hum arises from cars and trucks crossing a steel bridge. Shoes click on the sidewalk, an ambulance siren wails, the crosswalk signal beeps, a horse and carriage combine natural with manmade sounds, a boom box leaks its rhythms, cell phone conversations and rings punctuate the traditional city sounds, air hammers blast away, window air conditioners hum, and subway noises erupt from underground.

As Evelyn Glennie reminds us, “Sound is everywhere. We have to listen.” It is from such observations, such deconstructing of the elements of the urban cacophony, that Glennie continues making discoveries to incorporate into her music. The sounds and rhythms she finds in nature are much more subtle and meditative. She seems to need the two extremes of rhythms for the wide variety within her music.

A huge gong that she strikes in the deserted German factory creates a sound wave that seems to travel on and on forever. Her snare drum solo in Grand Central Station takes full advantage of that cavernous space which she fills with powerful, sharp sounds. On a Manhattan rooftop she plays a percussive duet with another musician as a huge crane taps out an earth-shaking rhythm with great intervals punctured by the huge concrete ball that lays waste to buildings. In Japan various kodo drummers perform a beautiful piece with Evelyn, who adds the subtleties and grace of the marimba to her array of instruments. Post-modern music is one positive aspect of an otherwise suspect globalization.

To make the point that rhythm is not just aural, the filmmaker shows beautiful repetitions and variations in the visual world. A reflection on still water is broken up into light wave patterns as the smooth surface is disturbed. Bright colorful banners reveal the velocity and direction of the wind, ranging from breeze to gale. Reflections of buildings in the windows of other buildings provide ripples of visual rhythm through repeated images with slight variation. TOUCH THE SOUND reopens our eyes and our ears and reminds us of the amazing wealth of sensations within our natural and human-made world.

To Glennie, the silence between the beats is just as important as the actual moment of surface striking surface. The beat cannot be perceived without the silent intervals. Glennie sits in a Japanese garden as a young man slowly but methodically and prayerfully rakes the gray pebbles into perfect patterns around impressive rocks representing mountains. In this space the human being takes natural elements and reconfigures them in honor of nature and her wonders.

With her perseverance, talent, and experimentation, Evelyn Glennie turned the little Scottish farm girl into a world-renowned percussionist who has played with the finest orchestras of the world. Her very first CD recording won a Grammy in 1988, and she has recorded over a dozen CDs since then as well as performing with Brazilian samba groups, Japanese kodo drummers, Indonesian gamelan orchestras, and progressive singer Björk.

With so much success and experience, Glennie finds questions about her deafness to be irrelevant and actually insulting. People are immensely impressed by her music and her sensitivity to sounds and vibrations, not by the fact that she is a deaf woman making music. As she says, “All the other senses have taken the place of the lost one.” She lost one sense and gained a richly rewarding world of new sensations and creativity.

In this film Evelyn Glennie performs solo and with Fred Frith, Roxanne Butterfly (USA), Horazio ‘El Negro” Hernandez (USA), Za Ondekoza (Japan), This Mika & Saikou (Japan), and Jason ‘The Fogmaster’ (USA).

Director Thomas Riedelsheimer discovered Evelyn Glennie while editing his rough cut of RIVERS AND TIDES: ANDY GOLDSWORTHY WORKING WITH TIME (2000). In the background he often played a CD of Glennie’s marimba interpretation of a work by Japanese musician Keiko Abe. “The dynamics of the playing, the warmth of the soundscape and the changing sentiments in her interpretations remained in my mind.” Finally hearing her perform live in 2001 in Cheltenham, England, Riedelsheimer realized that his next film must be about Evelyn Glennie. “I wanted to listen into her world with my instrument – the camera.” But he made the very wise decision of avoiding her everyday musical life of concerts and performances with the great orchestras of the world. Instead he chose to go with her to a variety of places to capture solo performances and “small, improvised sessions with other musicians from around the globe.” That filming took a year, followed by another year of post-production work, but the film is well worth the time and care that went into it.

Riedelsheimer was born in September 1963 in Germany. He studied at the Academy for Film and Television in Munich (1984-1991) and for the past twenty years has worked as a free-lance author, director and cameraman in Germany and abroad, including Somalia, Tanzania, South Africa, New Zealand, Latvia, Russia, Tibet, Nepal, Japan, Canada, Scotland. He occasionally lectures in seminars on cinematography at the Film Academy in Munich.

– Chale Nafus, Director of Programming, Austin Film Society

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