Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs archive

for rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The program was originally broadcast

in 1993, and the presenter was Sue Lawley.

My cast away this week is a musician. A farmer's daughter from Northeast Scotland, she began to

lose her hearing at the age of eight. By the time she was 12, she was profoundly deaf.

Nevertheless, she was determined to pursue a musical career, and at the age of 16,

one a place at the Royal Academy of Music, where she carried off several of the major prizes.

Today, although only 27 years old, she has an international reputation as a percussion virtuoso,

giving more than a hundred concerts and recitals a year, playing hundreds of different instruments,

from the tambourine and the tubular bells to the tom tom and the Chinese gong.

She shrugs off her deafness as an irrelevance. If anything, she says it's a musical advantage.

She is Evelyn Glenny. How can it be an irrelevance Evelyn? I mean, surely music is written to be

heard. I think music is an experience. It's an emotional experience. Music is oral, it's visual.

It's something that quite often we can't actually explain. We can't actually find the words to

explain it. And for me, I find that I get great satisfaction in trying to work out a score,

in actually becoming one with my instruments, actually finding out the voice of the instrument,

if you like, or the spirit of the instrument. But you can pick up a score, can you, and read it

like a book? Yes, I can pick up really any score. Of course, the more contemporary it is,

you know, if it's really squeaky gate type music, then that can be quite hard. But basically,

I can pick up a score and make sense of it. And that's absolutely vital. So basically,

my listening repertoire is very small, but I can quite quickly read a score and really make sense

of that. But how deaf are you? You're not stone deaf. You're not completely deaf. No, that's

...