Evelyn Glennie, WOW!

I just caught Evelyn Glennie performing the Schwantner Percussion Concerto with the LA Phil and was completely blown away by the power of her performance. You never notice that being profoundly deaf in any way compromises her musicianship or her ability to interact socially.

What I couldn't believe was that often she is completely turned away from the conductor, yet maintains perfect coordination with the orchestra. Her sense of tempo is just picture perfect. At the cd signing afterwards she appears from a distance to be chatting away with fans. On the radio she answers questions and interacts with the host with complete aplomb.

Of interest to this list, on the radio interview she mentioned that she's exploring her Scottish roots and that she has taken up the "pipes."

She has a website at: http://www.evelyn.co.uk/script.htm

in which she has posted a very fascinating article on hearing. For your convenience I'll paste it into this email

Evelyn's Hearing
Surprisingly, we have had more feed back regarding the essay on Evelyn's hearing than for any other item on the site. It has obviously helped clarify Evelyn's situation and helped dispel some of the myths.
Evelyn and I are happy for interviewers and reporters to continue to quote extracts from this essay and ask that the underlying message is retained.
Music represents life. A particular piece of music may describe a real, fictional or abstract scene from almost any area of human experience or imagination. It is the musicians job to paint a picture which communicates to the audience the scene the composer is trying to describe. Evelyn hopes that the audience will be stimulated by what she has to say (through the language of music) and will therefore leave the concert hall feeling entertained. If the audience is instead only wondering how a deaf musician can play percussion then Evelyn has failed as a musician. For this reason Evelyn's deafness is not mentioned in any of the information supplied by Evelyn's office to the press or concert promoters. Unfortunately, Evelyn's deafness makes good headlines. Evelyn has learnt from childhood that if she refuses to discuss her deafness with the media they will just make it up. The several hundred articles and reviews written about Evelyn every year add up to a total of many thousands, only a handful accurately describe her hearing impairment. More than 90% are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that Evelyn could be a musician. This web page is designed to set the record straight and allow people to enjoy the experience of being entertained by one of the world's great musicians rather than some freak or miracle of nature.

Deafness is poorly understood in general. For instance, there is a common misconception that deaf people live in a world of silence. To understand the nature of deafness, first one has to understand the nature of hearing.

Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air which the ear picks up and converts to electrical signals, which are then interpreted by the brain. The sense of hearing is not the only sense that can do this, touch can do this too. If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration the ear starts becoming inefficient and the rest of the body's sense of touch starts to take over. For some reason we tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration, in reality they are the same thing. It is interesting to note that in the Italian language this distinction does not exist. The verb "sentire" means to hear and the same verb in the reflexive form "sentirsi" means to feel. Deafness does not mean that you can't hear, only that there is something wrong with the ears. Even someone who is totally deaf can still hear/feel sounds.

If we can all feel low frequency vibrations why can't we feel higher vibrations? It is my belief that we can, it's just that as the frequency gets higher and our ears become more efficient they drown out the more subtle sense of "feeling" the vibrations. Evelyn spent a lot of time when she was young (with the help of Ron Forbes her percussion teacher at school) refining her ability to detect vibrations. She would stand with her hands against the classroom wall while Ron played notes on the timpani (timpani produce a lot of vibrations). Eventually Evelyn managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on her body she felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch she had before losing her hearing. The low sounds she feels mainly in her legs and feet and high sounds might be particular places on her face, neck and chest.

It is worth pointing out at this stage that Evelyn is not totally deaf, she is profoundly deaf. Profound deafness covers a wide range of symptoms, although it is commonly taken to mean that the quality of the sound heard is not sufficient to be able to understand the spoken word from sound alone. With no other sound interfering, Evelyn can usually hear someone speaking although she cannot understand them without the additional input of lip-reading. In Evelyn's case the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing but more importantly the quality of the sound is very poor. For instance when a phone rings Evelyn hears a kind of crackle. However, it is a distinctive type of crackle that Evelyn associates with a phone so she knows when the phone rings. This is basically the same as how normally hearing people detect a phone, the phone has a distinctive type of ring which we associate with a phone. Evelyn and I can infact communicate over the phone. Evelyn does most of the talking but we have a few words which I can communicate by hitting the transmitter with a pen, Evelyn hears this as clicks. We have a code that depends on the number of hits or the rhythm that I can use to communicate a handful of words.

So far we have the hearing of sounds and the feeling of vibrations. There is one other element to the equation, sight. We can also see items move and vibrate. If Evelyn sees a drum head or cymbal vibrate or even sees the leaves of a tree moving in the wind then subconsciously her brain creates a corresponding sound. A common and ill informed question from interviewers is "how can you be a musician when you can't hear what you are doing?" The answer is of course that Evelyn couldn't be a musician if she were not able to hear. Another often asked question is "how do you hear what you are playing?" The logical answer to this is; how does anyone hear? An electrical signal is generated in the ear and various bits of other information from our other senses all get sent to the brain which then processes the data to create a sound picture. The various processes involved in hearing a sound are very complex but we all do it subconsciously so we group all these processes together and call it simply listening. The same is true for Evelyn, some of the processes or original information may be different but to hear sound all she does is to listen. Evelyn has no more idea of how she hears than you or I.

You will notice that more and more the answers are heading towards areas of philosophy. Who can say that when two normally hearing people hear a sound they hear the same sound? I would suggest that everyone's hearing is different. All we can say is that the sound picture built up by their brain is the same, so that outwardly there is no difference. For Evelyn, as for all of us, she is better at certain things with her hearing than others. She needs to lip-read to understand speech but her awareness of the acoustics in a concert venue is excellent. For instance, she will sometimes describe an acoustic in terms of how thick the air feels.

To summarize, Evelyn's hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers her. There are a couple of inconveniences but in general it doesn't affect her life much. To Evelyn, her deafness is no more important than the fact she is a 5'2" female with brown eyes. Sure, she sometimes has to find solutions to problems related to her hearing and music but so do all musicians. Most of us know very little about hearing, even though we do it all the time. Likewise, Evelyn doesn't know very much about deafness, what's more she isn't particularly interested. I remember one occasion when uncharacteristically Evelyn became upset with a reporter for constantly asking questions only about her deafness. Evelyn said: "If you want to know about deafness, you should interview an audiologist. My speciality is music."

In this web page I have tried to explain something which Evelyn herself is unable to explain. Being married to Evelyn I feel more qualified than most to attempt an explanation. Even so, no one really understands how Evelyn does what she does, me included! Please enjoy the music and forget the rest.

Written by Greg Malcangi, edited by Evelyn Glennie.

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