A life’s themes resound

“Touch the Sound” begins with a close-up of an enormous standing gong being struck. The reverberations start low, but as the camera pulls back they grow exponentially and seem to explode through an entire building with terrifying force. In the world of Evelyn Glennie, the woman at the gong, sound has power.

Subtitled “A Sound Journey With Evelyn Glennie,” “Touch” is a potent and imaginative creative biography of virtuoso percussionist Glennie, a Grammy winner who’s collaborated with both Bjork and symphony orchestras and says, “My whole life is about sound. It’s what makes me tick as a human being.”

“Touch’s” German filmmaker, Thomas Riedelsheimer, has ambitions beyond showing the charismatic and articulate Glennie at work. He wants to enable audiences to experience reality the way she does, to create an understanding about how an artist intersects with the world. And he wants to explain how Glennie became one of the world’s foremost solo percussionists despite a neurological disorder that attacked her hearing in preadolescence and left her deaf as an adult.

That he is successful in all these attempts will not surprise those who remember Riedelsheimer’s masterful previous documentary, “Rivers and Tides,” an examination of the world of sculptor Andy Goldsworthy. As both films demonstrate, Riedelsheimer has a gift for establishing intimacy with artists, for getting them to communicate with him as a peer. Glennie, as Goldsworthy before her, senses an intelligent sympathy, even a comradeship with this filmmaker who not only directs but photographs and edits his work himself.

That enormous gong is located in a cavernous abandoned factory building in Cologne, Germany, with spectacular acoustics, where Glennie and avant-garde musician Fred Frith, a fellow Scot, hole up to improvise a CD. The mesmerizing interplay of sounds that results, as well as the involving performance images, make this “Touch the Sound’s” central event.

Cologne, however, is not the only place Glennie goes to make music. In the course of a year Riedelsheimer spent following her to improvised jam sessions rather than formal concerts, the artist also plays with Japanese drummers in Fuji City and Kyoto and collaborates with a wide range of Manhattan musicians in sessions that consciously make use of the random sounds of the city.

By periodically focusing on and filming the sources of specific sounds, from the clip-clop of horses’ hoofs and the flutter of pigeons’ wings to the brutal cacophony of demolition and construction, “Touch the Sound” helps us understand how Glennie perceives musical value where others hear noise. To think about each particular sound as having meaning becomes a system to rediscover the world, to see what was familiar in a new way.

One of the most affecting trips Glennie makes is to Scotland. She visits the farm in Aberdeen where she grew up, as well as a school for children with hearing problems, and relates the remarkable story of how she overcame deafness to succeed in an art where hearing is usually considered essential.

Determined to remain a musician despite encroaching deafness, Glennie turned to percussion and gradually developed the ability to hear sound through her entire body, to use all of herself as a kind of resonating chamber. She can’t explain how this works, it just does, and, a bit defensively, she points out that most hearing people can’t fully explain how they are able to hear, either.

Although she won her first Grammy for a recording of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, at this point in her career Glennie’s passion is improvisation. Wherever she goes, even before scheduled jam sessions begin, she can be observed brilliantly noodling around with everyday objects like soda cans and suitcases. When she says “I want to be open to everything that comes my way” and “There’s sound absolutely everywhere, we have to listen,” these are not bromides but precepts she is determined to live by.

Like Glennie, Riedelsheimer is something of an improviser. “Touch the Sound” spent a full year in post-production, a length of time that enabled the filmmaker to find the editing rhythm that allows the film to cut artfully back and forth between these various musical sessions and the beautifully shot scenic footage that unfolds between the music.

When Frith calls artists “people who are in touch with the energy they had as children,” his description applies to the percussionist and the filmmaker in equal measure.

*

‘Touch the Sound’

MPAA rating: Unrated

Times guidelines: Adult sensibility

Released by Shadow Distribution. Director Thomas Riedelsheimer. Producers Stefan Tolz, Leslie Hills, Trevor Davies. Cinematographer Thomas Riedelsheimer. Editor Thomas Riedelsheimer. Running time: 1 hour, 39 minutes.

Nuart, 11272 Santa Monica Blvd., West Los Angeles, (310) 281-8223.