MOVIES: Touch the Sound (Thomas Riedelsheimer, 2004)

"Sound is who I am." Those are the first words we hear from percussionist Evelyn Glennie in this documentary. "It's what makes me tick as a human being."

Glennie is the world's foremost classical percussionist, and the first (perhaps still the only) to make a full-time career of the job. She tours the world giving solo performances and performing percussion concertos, many written specifically for her, with top orchestras.

If you're not familiar with her career, it will come as something of a shock when you learn, about 20 minutes into the movie, that Glennie is almost completely deaf; she began losing her hearing at age 8, and it was nearly gone by 12. She began studying percussion, and found that she could "hear" -- she'd object to those quote marks, I think -- different pitches by the way they resonate at different places in her body. However it works, her sense of pitch is good enough that she's able to sing in tune with other instruments.

The music we hear throughout the film is by Glennie, most of it improvised, and despite her formidable performance technique, most of it dull. There are some exceptions -- a mournful duet for Glennie (on marimba) and electric guitarist Fred Frith, a marvelous rehearsal with a group of Japanese Taiko drummers, a solo performed in a small Tokyo nightclub with a pair of chopsticks and the empty dishes from her meal -- but most of the music is meandering and unfocused.

That's true of the film as a whole, too. Too often, Riedelsheimer fills the screen with cliched nature images -- leaves rustling in the breeze, waves crashing on the beach, ripples in a pond -- as the music plays, instead of letting us watch the musicians at work. And we follow Glennie from place to place, but with no sense of chronology; the scenes feel almost entirely disconnected from one another, random snapshots from Glennie's life.

Glennie herself is a fascinating woman (though she tends to be a bit on the New Age-y side for my tastes, going on about how music and sound are just as important as breathing and such nonsense), and if you're a fan, as I am, the movie's worth seeing just to watch her at work and marvel at her skill. But if you don't come into the movie already a fan, I fear you'll be bored to death.