Resonate

Percussionist Evelyn Glennie — or rather, Dame Evelyn Glennie — is spending the week in residency in Winston-Salem, N.C., where she will be performing and giving master classes at Wake Forest University.

As far as the percussion community knows, Glennie is the only classical percussionist in the Western Hemisphere that is actually a “full-time” performer: All the other percussionists have to teach or have another job to sustain themselves financially. She also is the only classical percussionist who performs regularly on network television and who has a film about her “Touch the Sound,” available at every Blockbuster.  

Perhaps she has become so well-known because she is deaf. She lost her hearing when she was 12 years old.

Glennie always performs barefoot because she says it helps her feel the music’s vibrations. She has a very particular, aggresive, almost harsh tone when she plays instruments such as the marimba, and some percussionists attribute her sound to her hearing impairment.

Glennie created a busy schedule  for herself this week in North Carolina. She presented a master class on Saturday with students from Wake Forest, Elon College and North Carolina School of the Arts (my high school alma mater). On Saturday, Sunday and Tuesday she will be the featured soloist with the Winston-Salem Symphony. She is performing Joseph Schwantner’s “Percussion Concerto,” which Glennie commissioned. (The Schwantner concerto is pretty fascinating. It involves a huge amount of percussion instruments, and features the soloist on the marimba and the shekere.)

Glennie has made an undeniable contribution to contemporary classical percussion both in her effort to commission new works for percussion — she has commissioned more than 140 pieces — and in exposing percussion to a more mainstream audience.