re:mote voices

Title: Touch The Sound
Cast:Evelyn Glennie
Director: Thomas Riedelsheimer

Evelyn Glennie is a Grammy Award winning classical percussionist. She is also mostly deaf. As an 8-year-old Evelyn started to play piano, around the same time her hearing started to deteriorate. By the age of 12 she was looking to diversify musically, and came upon percussion. By then her hearing specialists were telling her that as far as they were concerned she was deaf, should be taught in a school for the deaf and would never play music again. With her parents support she remained in mainstream education and continued to study music.

In theory hearing is about sound waves and vibrations in the ear. To a degree what Evelyn has done is to use the organ of skin to replace the sense of hearing. So instead of explicitly hearing sound with her ears, she feels sound with her body. The result is a remarkable sense for sound and acoustics, as demonstrated in this documentary Touch The Sound. Evelyn describes being a musician as being on a sound journey, and the film follows her on part of her journey. As she travels from New York to where she was born in Aberdeenshire, to working with Japanese drummers in Fuji City, to recording an improvised album with Fred Frith in Cologne.

Throughout the film we have a mix of performance and commentary from Evelyn about her life and her beliefs in sound. From a cavernous train station in New York to a crumbling ruin in Aberdeen we go from extreme to extreme. But it is the recording session in Cologne that forms the centre of Touch The Sound, the film keeps on coming back to that. In Cologne she meets Frith for the first time and the two improvise together. The studio for their performance is an abandoned factory, a huge place full of railings, girders and concrete, which they incorporate into the free form of their sound.

While in Japan, we have a comment from one of the drummers, he explains how the taiko sounds came from working in the fields. How music is influenced by life, and that the Japanese word that means "to live" comes from the word for "to breathe". From which he suggests that the journey of the musician is about learning to breathe. At another point in the film, Frith asks Evelyn whether she was taught to breathe as musician, suggesting that breathing is central to music. Ideas of breathing suggesting another facet of what makes sound an experience.

Improvised music is mixed bag. An area where it is easy to fall into the mundane, regurgitating the kind of wildly experimental dross that a thousand others have done exactly the same before. For me, music is something that you feel, something you experience some sense of joy from when it is at its best. The recording sessions in Cologne sum up the ideas of breathing music, of creating and experiencing a sense of joy, allowing the viewer in some way to Touch The Sound.