(The Okanagan Sunday - Sept. 27, 2009)
Dame Evelyn Glennie put on a concert here in Kelowna a few weeks ago, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra. The orchestra was good; Glennie was sensational. In her case, the word "sensational" has multiple meanings.
Glennie is a classical percussionist. She is, her promotional biography asserts, the "world's only solo percussionist." If you think of a percussionist as someone who pounds a drum kit, you're grossly underestimating Glennie.
Yes, she does play drums. Including those big drums called tympani. She also plays the xylo- phone, marimba, vibraphone, cymbals, wood blocks, temple bells, chimes, cowbells, tambourines and gongs. Plus a vast range of ethnic instruments such as congas, bongos, timbales, djembes, bodhrans, log drums, gamelan, wind gongs, rain trees, maracas, shakers, guiros, shekeres, pandeiros, claves, steel pan and taiko drums. She has over 1,800 percussion instruments in her collection. When she goes on tour - over 100 concerts a year - she takes along up to two tonnes of instruments.In concert, the sounds she creates range from sustained notes as haunting as a lover's sigh, to a torrent of sound that overwhehns the senses like standing under a waterfall.
I worked in radio for 10 years. I produced close to a thousand classical music programs. In my opinion, you haven't fully experienced Vivaldi until you've seen and heard it played by Gleiinie on the marimba. All this, and she is profoundly deaf. She has been since she 12.
"Unfortunately," she writes in an essay on hearing, "my deafness makes good headlines." Of hun- dreds of articles written about her each year, she says, "More than 90 per cent are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musiciaii." Obviously, her loss of hearing is no handicap, But what is a handicap?
During the 1970s, I went through that painful period of adjusting my language to what was called, often derisively, "political correctness." So we avoided words like "crippled" or "retarded." Rather, people were described as "disabled" - or even "differently abled" - to avoid stigmatizing those who functioned with fewer senses or limbs than normal. Even the term "normal" became suspect; it implied that others were not. It wasn't just a matter of being "correct." I felt the anger of people treated like helpless idiots simply because they occupied wheelchairs or had trouble hearing.
"Does she like ice cream?" the waitress asks a paraplegic woman's coinpanion.
"She can hear and speak for herself," retorts the woman in the wheelchair.
Occasionally, in Toronto, I attended Robert Rumball's Centre for the Deaf. After his Sunday morning worship service, everyone gathered for coffee in the hall. Often, I was the only speaking person present. Otherwise the crowded room was eerily silent -- until some group suddenly burst into raucous laughter over a joke narrated in sign language. In that context, which of us was handicapped?
Unfortunately, all the words in our language that deal with a loss of sensory inputs or physical out- puts -- all the words that collectively describe deafness, blindness, loss of mobility, or arrested mental development - all imply some kind of deficiency. But Dame Evelyn Glennie is clearly not deficient.
In her essay on hearing, she suggests, "Hearing is basically a specialized form of touch. Sound is simply vibrating air ... If you are standing by the road and a large truck goes by, do you hear or do you feel the vibration? The answer is both. With very low frequency vibration ... the body's sense of touch takes over. We tend to make a distinction between hearing a sound and feeling a vibration; in reality they are the same thing."
"If we can all feel low frequency vibrations," her essay continues, "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."
She performs her, concerts barefoot, listening through the soles of her feet. She maintains that she can "distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound." Clearly, she has honed a sense that the rest of us don't even know we have. Perhaps it is not Glennie who has lost one of her senses. Perhaps we have let an innate sense atrophy. Which should make us question what constitutes a "handicap." Certainly, an absence of conveii- tional hearing has not restricted Glennie's career.
Would Glennie have been a better musician if she had full hearing? The question is meaningless. Would Stevie Wonder have been more creative if he could see? Would Stephen Hawking be a bet- ter mathematician if he were not confined to a wheelchair? These people are what they are. It doesn't matter whether they achieved their status because of o'r in spite of their, umm, disabilities.
The amazing thing is not how Glennie "hears" her music. The amazing thing is the music she makes.
Jim Tavior is an Okanagan Centre author and keelance journalist. He can be reached at rewrite@shaw.ca.