Evelyn Glennie

This lack of repertoire presented Glennie with yet another challenge: It forced her to enhance and expand the mainstream music world's repertoire to include percussion. During her career, she's been responsible for commissioning more than 100 new works.

"Obviously, I am very interested in young, up-and-coming composers," she says, "those who are very fresh in their ideas and perhaps have not yet found their voice or their own stamp mark -- ones who are still experimenting."

"But I also like to work with those who are established and have been in the profession for a long time," she confides. It's a challenge for any composer, since writing for percussion often presents new sets of problems. It can often take several tries before a person can set out to accomplish what they set out to create. Despite her interest in new composers, Glennie has not neglected older works. Her performances includes works by Darius Milhaud and Béla Bartók as well as lesser-known composers.

Going local

Evelyn Glennie performs around 110 concerts a year at many different venues all over the world. She spends up to four months of the year touring the United States alone. But wherever she is, she tries to get to know something about the drumming tradition of that particular country. "I think the great thing about percussion is that it is so universal," she says, noting that percussionists she has met during her travels have all influenced her on some level.

"A lot of great percussion players do not have agents or a P.R. company to promote them," she says. "They dedicate themselves entirely to, say, traditional Indian drumming or Indonesian Gamelon. They all inspire me in different ways," she says. "I get a lot of inspiration by simply meeting musicians, irrespective of the instrument they happen to play."

The possibilities for inspiration have been nearly endless, particularly considering some of the names Glennie has worked with over the years. She has collaborated with performers as diverse as Murray Perahia, an Indonesian Gamelan Ensemble and the Icelandic pop star Björk, as well as the world's major conductors and orchestras, including Georg Solti, Mstislav Rostropovich and the New York Philharmonic.

"Each musician has something to say," she says. "When you are dealing with musicians, you have to see them as creators of sound. They are putting sound into some kind of emotion for the audience. If you open yourself up, it is amazing how much you can share and create and where this sort of experience can take you."

Touring with a 'ton' of instruments

A Glennie performance is a major production. It actually takes about four hours to set up her instruments for each concert and another two hours to take them down again. She owns more than 1,000 instruments and literally brings a ton of them with her on tour, often playing two or three dozen in one concert.

She has even designed and created new percussion instruments. "The instruments look intriguing -- a lot of the pieces look like artwork," she says. "People see a drum and want to touch it. Percussion is a family of instruments with which you can communicate quickly with people, share this whole world of sound. And there don't seem to be any class barriers."

Alongside Glennie's concerts and tours, she has made a dozen recordings. It’s hard to imagine that she has any time or energy left for anything else. But there are hidden reserves. She composes for a variety of media, including film and television. She has also written a best-selling autobiography called Good Vibrations as well as educational books aimed at group percussion for beginners in schools. A self-taught ethnomusicologist, she writes a regular column that introduces readers to many of the world’s lesser-known instruments. No matter what Glennie undertakes, she approaches it with the same verve and enthusiasm characteristic of her performing.

Beyond silence

Evelyn Glennie's astonishing and illustrious career, is all the more surprising in light of the fact that she has been profoundly deaf since she was 12. She can hear some sounds, and also perceives musical vibrations through her feet and the rest of her body and she communicates with hearing people by lip reading.

A quote from an essay that appears on her Web site perhaps best describes Glennie's attitude about this aspect of her life. "Evelyn's hearing is something that bothers other people far more than it bothers her," the essay states. "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."

Her attitude isn't surprising, for Glennie is nothing if not uncompromisingly ambitious in her creativity and talent.

Although she is already one of the most celebrated musicians of her generation, Glennie still has a rather long "To Do" list. "I think there is a lot for me to do still," she says. "One of my aims is to create a research center for percussion that is basically bringing together a museum library, a performance center and recording studio that is open to seasoned musicians and the community."

In a moment of humor, Glennie takes a shot at her own ambitious goals: "I would probably need to live to be 200 in order to fullfil all my aims!"

High up on her list is communicating -- with her husband Greg and cat "Teabag" and a number of other people.

"Music is our daily medicine," she says. "For all sorts of people music therapy or, more exactly, sound therapy is so essential. I desperately want to communicate to as many people as possible."

Breandáin O'Shea