'Touch the Sound' and Let It Touch You

Warning: written under the influence of Wagner, which makes me a little delirious, if not downright demented.

It all began with Bugs. Bunny, that is. When I was small, I watched a lot of cartoons; one in particular entered my brain like a ice pick through butter, and stuck there: a rabbit, a hunter, a spear and magic helmet. Magic helmet? Magic Helmet...

"What's that music?" I asked my mother.

"It's Wagner."

"I want that."

So off we went to the library, where I picked up an ancient boxed set of Wagner's Siegfried and headed to the checkout counter. "I'd like to take this out, please."

The librarian gave me a rather skeptical look and said, "Where are your parents?"

And that was the beginning for me. The sound touched me, good and hard, and never left.

'Great black infinite void'

Way before movies, there was opera. The surround-sound of Wagner's Ring Cycle, the total art work (Gesamptkunswerk) and the Bayreuth theatre predated modern cinema by many years, but the intent was the same -- a totality of experience meant to transport you, body and soul. Film and sound are really perfect for each other. Terrence Malick's new film The New World opens with the great open E flat chord that begins the Ring Cycle. This is a leitmotif suitable for the creation of the world. When into the silence of a dark theater, come the deepest orchestral groans, like the sound of two tectonic plates shifting, it is sound for the bottom of the ocean, the beginning of time, the great black infinite void, in which there is nothing, until there is something and that something is music. Rising, turning, spiralling up into light. It is music suitable for the beginning of the world. Or its end. Wagner's Tristan and Isolde ends with the world's longest and most unbelievably musical orgasm: Liebestod (love death). Wagner may have been a towering asshole, anti-semite, adulterer, and so on. But he did write some beautiful stuff.

Thankfully, you don't have to feel divided about percussionist Evelyn Glennie, the subject of filmmaker Thomas Riedelsheimer's new documentary Touch the Sound. In addition to her musical chops, she is a lovely presence, thoughtful, charming, and a joy to watch, because she often appears so joyful herself -- hair flying, arms a blur, bare feet tapping, making some extraordinary sounds.

Dragon-free films

The film begins with an extreme close up of a drum, like a great bronze eye, then pulls back to show Glennie banging a gong, and getting it on, if you will. This is bravura filmmaking, each image composed, very much like a musical work. It is as much a collection of visual elements as it is sound, and in this fashion, almost operatic, although concerned with far less dramatic moments than are usually included in operas. No dwarves, no dragons, no swooping valkyries: just ordinary things, people in airports, and train stations, musicians hauling equipment and pigeons. "Hearing is a form of touch," Glennie states. But it is much more than that. Music is a universal language that supplants any and all national boundaries, even those between the disabled and the abled world. Glennie, who began to go deaf as a child, was blessed with parents who refused to treat her any differently after her diagnosis. Growing up in Northern Scotland, she also had the good fortune to have a music teacher who was willing to learn along with his student.

An early experiment in feeling sound started with Glennie's teacher tuning a drum to smaller and smaller intervals, so that the minutest changes in sound could be registered through her hands. In the documentary, Glennie teaches a deaf student to feel sound in this same way, and the camera captures every flash of emotion in both the teacher and the student. Especially clear is the delight that registers on the young girl's face when Glennie tells her that deaf people have the capacity to actually hear more than an audience that has the full use of their ears.

Belly music

The physical aspects of sound are immediate. One thing strikes or strokes another, whether it is the most gossamer touch on a marimba or the resonating thunder of taiko drums. The body is as much an instrument as the drum or guitar. Glennie often plays with her belly just touching the edge of the drum, so that the body itself becomes a resonating chamber of sorts. Life is sound, according to Glennie; its opposite is not silence, but death.

Life is also movement, and the camera is never static, but always moving, circling around Glennie as she plays, or pulling up and out to an open expanse of sky. So too, the narrative that follows the musician on her travels around the world (she performs more than 100 concerts per year), as the film's subtitle suggests, is also a journey. It's an around the world tour from New York to Santa Cruz to Tokyo, which can occasionally be disorientating, especially in Japan where the sheer proliferation of urban sound is like an assault upon the senses. Glennie terms it a cacophony. And there is that sense that paying attention to sound all the time, is exhausting, even bewildering, especially in the dissonance between the natural and urban environment.

On her visit to Japan, Glennie meets with a group of Taiko drummers, who talk about how their art arose out of the demands of rural Japanese life, the endless backbreaking work in the rice paddies. In order to train for the rigours of performing, the musicians run, and the sound of their breath and feet is itself a quiet music, and another reminder of the physical nature of drumming, made with hands and feet, heart and lungs. A shot of the musicians running in a pack, against a backdrop of Mount Fuji is only one of the many stunning images captured by Riedelsheimer. Despite the fact that this film is primarily concerned with sound, it bears some similarity to the work of Nathaniel Dorsky, whose films are utterly silent. The ordinary stuff of the world -- light on water, shadows, the patterns of leaves -- figures throughout.

Riedelsheimer's previous film, Rivers And Tides was about visual artist Andy Goldsworthy, and you can see the direct echoes of Goldsworthy's spirals and water leitmotifs occurring again, in another, almost Wagnerian touch. River and Tides and Touch the Sound share the reoccurring image of water, which is fitting considering that sound also comes in waves, washing over us and changing us with their passing.

Silent noise

The film is centered around the meeting of Glennie and famed improviser Fred Frith at an abandoned sugar factory in Germany to record a CD. Frith is a genial presence, possessed of some truly startling eyebrows, but someone whose warmth and character register like heat. Riedelsheimer films their improvisations on the walls and pipes of the disused factory. Unlike the stentorian roar of Wagner, Glennie often makes music out of the entirely prosaic, whether that's a wine bottle, a tin can, and some chopsticks in a Japanese coffee house, or a heap of rubbish on her ancestral farm. Even a high-heeled shoe or Fred Frith's back does the trick. Invention is second nature to improvisation; another necessary ingredient is play. Quite literally. "How many colors are there in a field of grass to the crawling baby unaware of 'Green'?" goes the famous line from experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage's Metaphors of Vision, which echoes Frith saying artists are people who never lost the sense of curiosity that they had as children.

The film screens January 20-26 at the Vancouver International Film Centre. It is preceded by The Ballet Russes. Both films are equally lovely, and will make you happy to be in this world. More than once, I found myself crying while watching Touch the Sound for no apparent reason, but then, beauty can do that to you. It is hard not to be ravished by the sheer amount of it present in this film, whether it's the sound of Taiko drums set to a pattern of raindrops on a window, or the sight of Fred Frith throwing long unrolling loops of paper into the air, that weave their tails behind them, not unlike huge graceful spermatozoa.

"All you have to do is listen," says Glennie. Which is the most profoundly moving thing about music -- its ability to physically touch you. Everyone who loves music knows exactly what that feels like, akin to an electric current up the spinal column. Is it any wonder that love and music are so inextricably linked. Both transform. As in the final moment in Tristan and Isolde, when Isolde's song ends and she drops onto the dead body of her lover, Wagner called this "Verklärung" meaning transfiguration: from something physical into something divine. If I'd lived in another age, music could easily have convinced me of God's existence. Maybe it still can.

Dorothy Woodend reviews films for The Tyee every Friday.