A few years ago, Thomas Riedelsheimer shared with us the visual beauty of artist Andy Goldsworthy in one of the best documentaries of recent years, Rivers and Tides. That film was a wonder to behold as we watched Goldsworthy’s creative process and how in his art nature and time come together in new and moving ways.
In Touch the Sound, Riedelsheimer is back, this time showing us a world of sound and rhythm. His focus is Grammy winning percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The opening lines of the film are Glennie’s comment that her whole life is about sound. Riedelsheimer helps us to focus on sound by emphasizing the ambient sounds and rhythms of everyday life – people walking through an airport, the different sound of a dog walking along, the sound of suitcases being rolled along rough floors, the fluttering of a bird’s wings – sounds that usually blend together in the amalgam of noise around us. But they all have their rhythm; they all are a bit of music in themselves.
Next, we get to see Glennie do a drum solo on a single snare drum as she stands in the middle of Grand Central Station in New York. It is amazing the variety of sounds and rhythms that she can make with only one drum.
Through the film, Riedelsheimer follows Glennie around the world – to Japan to play alongside and complimenting taiko drummers, to Germany as she and musician Fred Firth make a CD of improvised music, to her childhood home in Scotland. All the while, we hear the various rhythms of the world – both natural and intentionally created. All the while we get to wonder at the varieties of noises all around us and the way Glennie builds her own set of rhythms and noises to make music where there was none before.
I should probably mention before I go too far, that Glennie is deaf. She doesn’t hear the music around her. She doesn’t hear the music she makes. She doesn’t hear the music her fellow musicians are making. Well, at least not the same way most of the world hears them. She hears through the vibrations.
But this is not a film that exalts the way people with handicaps compensate for missing abilities. It is a film that exalts in the music that this person makes. And indeed, there is wonderful music to be experienced in the film.
As in Rivers and Tides, this film is paced to allow us to savor the art that is being shared with us. It would be wrong to rush through either film. In both films the real central character is not so much the person the film is about as it is the art produced.
Riedelsheimer also uses the visual nature of film in ways that enhance the music we are hearing, whether Glennie’s or nature’s. The result is a very pleasant blend of aural and visual beauty. Just as the score added to the experience of Rivers and Tides, the visuals add to the experience in Touch the Sound.
Between the two, I think Rivers and Tides is the better film, but to say that in no way diminishes this film. In both we get a chance to experience the spiritual nature of the world around us and the art people make with the gifts around us.
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TOUCH THE SOUND 
Thomas Riedelsheimer, the filmmaker who wowed audiences with his lyrical film "Rivers and Tides," introduces us to the world of Evelyn Glennie, a renowned percussionist, who happens to be deaf.
