Vibration, percussion and primitivism in avant-garde performance

Adrián CURTIN

pp. 227-247

in: Anthony Enns, Shelley Trower (eds), Vibratory modernism, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2013

Abstract

In her essays and public speeches, Dame Evelyn Glennie, the virtuoso percussionist, calls attention to the always-already potentially audiohaptic nature of vibratory perception. Glennie proposes that listening is not necessarily a single-sensory process restricted to sound waves detected by the ears but may be considered a whole-body phenomenon in which one can "touch", feel, and respond to sound as vibration.¹ She tells the story of how as a profoundly deaf 12-year-old (who also had perfect pitch) she worked with her percussion teacher to learn different instruments — especially the timpani — through hearing-feeling the sounds they made. She could register them in various parts of her body, distinguishing intervallic pitches by locating their sites of resonance, which might be on her hands, wrists, face, neck, chest, lower body, or feet, depending on the frequency of the vibration.² For this reason, Glennie plays barefoot in order to heighten her audio-haptic connection to sound.³ For Glennie, listening to sound in a holistic fashion enables her to experience the vibrating world, to feel its resonances within herself, and, ironically, to listen more sensitively than so-called hearing-enabled people. She considers it her aim to "teach the world to listen": not just with their ears but with their whole bodies functioning as resonating chambers.⁴