Evelyn Glennie has written two autobiographical tomes, so It is perhaps slightly contrary of me to use the much earlier volume here. How much do we want to measured against our younger selves, and what we thought important then?
Glennie’s early book, though, is an irrepressibly headlong flight through her beginning decades. Good Vibrations is the story of an absolute conviction of who Glennie wanted to be musically, and the ways in which she got there. The idea of a solo percussionist may not be as odd to us now (especially in light of the latest BBC Young Musician Of the Year winner - edited*), but in the 80s, mired as the classical world then was in a certain concert-life tradition, the idea was more than laughable. Glennie mentions accordion in her book as another instrument that has struggled to break into the solo recital arena; even in the early 2000s, I remember well the conversation I had with an accordionist who had just applied to an extremely well-known international competition, only to be told that they should withdraw their application as no one would be willing to sit through an entire recital of accordion music. And of course, we have also had several decades of Glennie herself driving the understanding that percussion can speak to us as widely and sensitively as does the more mainstream piano or strings. Thus we read the book with a chasm of tradition already between us and the printed page, and it is wonderful to think how our musical worlds have opened up.
It is perhaps this extra interval in the tides of society that means that I was surprised to learn that Glennie’s elder brother was “frustrated by what he called [Glennie’s] ‘non-natural’ use of words” in the book. I enjoy the forward tilt of the writing, not least because I recognize the pace of life in the alma mater we share. Glennie’s studies fill the majority of the book, given the little time that has elapsed between leaving the Academy and writing the book. It’s a very different picture on the surface – a student hostel in South London, wardens – but the tapestry of people and performances remains the same.
Inevitably, perhaps, Glennie devotes a fair bit of space to talking about what listening is, and her relationship with music. Her later book will delve into this even deeper, but here, already, there is much that is fascinating. Many years ago, on a trip to WOMAD, the festival of World music that then took place in Reading, I was trying to listen to a Chinese instrumentalist who had had the misfortune to be situated next to the drumming workshop tent. I was becoming more and more irritated at the sound pollution emanating from the enthusiastic children beside us, until my companion smiled at me and said, “You don’t have to listen with just your ears.” It was a salutary lesson that I have tried to live with since, sometimes more successfully than others. I certainly learned that listening as a skill in which I had little multi-sensory experience, something I took especially into my primary school teaching. I’m often aware that children listen with their whole body, something we tend to train out of them as they get older; it’s a shame that we don’t train that full body experience to focus completely and exclusively on the music being performed. Glennie’s attitude to silence in music perhaps sums this up best:
“Silence in music is very important to me – leaving space between the phrases without feeling the need to cover it by lifting a stick, for example, so that the audience is distracted from experiencing the silence by movement. When I perform I consciously use this space in different ways. It’s sometimes nice for the audience to have a moment at the beginning or end of a piece to prepare themselves for what is going to come or to reflect on what they have heard before they clap or rush on to something else. […] That silence is so important.”
I’ve chosen a video of Glennie improvising on drums here. It feels to me to sum up her ways of listening.