Just watched this “documentary” earlier in the week and I’m really dissapointed.
I was looking forward to watching this for a long time and I finally put it to the top of my Netflix queue. I’m regretting not only the time it took to watch this crappy film, but also the time Netflix could have sent me a better movie. The idea of the movie centers around a deaf woman who is a percussionist. As a drummer I totally understand the feeling of sound. I really wanted to enjoy this thing. But as it unfolds, she is a fair-to-mediocre drummer, is wasting an inordinate amount of money on some nice drums that I wish I had, and to be completely honest, I’m not so sure she’s deaf.
I’ve had enough of this hippie “all sound is music” bullshit. I get the whole “ambient noise as an instrument” thing, but even background noise has to be orchestrated sometimes. You can tell me that trying to harness the sounds of a city is futile and wrong, and you’d be right. But you can’t tell me that it’s music. It can be beautiful, but it’s not music.
Maybe this outs me as a “simple drummer” and you’ll tell me that the movie goes over my head because I’m not a “true musician”, but I just can’t figure out what the hell she’s trying to say. What is her point? She comes across like an enthusiastic 5th grade music teacher who wants to impart the joy of music into her students. And I’m totally in tune with that element. I completely empathize with having the music inside and wanting to share it with others. But she is all over the map with her playing style and what she’s trying to accomplish. One minute she’s playing a basic rudimentary snare solo in Times Square, another she’s recording the sound of water drops in a British farm house. Playing with Taiko drummers in Japan and enjoying the music of the crowd noise at Los Angeles Airport. I get it, music is everywhere, sound is important, but is that all she’s trying to get across? She’s got ninety minutes of film dedicated to her, doesn’t she have anything better to say to us?
The weirdest parts were her impromptu sessions in an large echo chamber warehouse. The sounds of paper being thrown, guitars being manipulated in “new” ways, rubbing a bronze pot. I understand the beauty in each of these things, I hear the wonderful sounds of each of these things, but it’s not music until you do something WITH them. I can fart, I can burp, I can vomit. All of these things are sounds, none of them are musical by themselves.
And maybe my problem is not that I don’t get it, but that I got it a long time ago. I’ve been enjoying experimental sounds/instruments for decades now. Maybe this movie is far too basic and I was looking to see something new where I’ve already been. They completely run over the fact that she’s deaf. It’s mentioned a couple of times and then back to the strange sounds. I would have liked to hear more about a world of silent vibrations, about “touching the sounds” rather than a ninety minute meditation on listening to what we hear. Or they could have explained why a middle age woman who went deaf at age seven speaks with such excellent tone and at such a rapid pace. Really, I’m not looking to hear the stereotypical “deaf” voice, but there was NO loss of tone in her voice. Something I found distracting in a movie about a deaf woman.
I’m sure Miss Glennie is a really nice woman and I hope she is successful in everything she does, but that movie was hard to sit through. Listening to her play was like listening to someone interrupt a fired-up drum circle to play a fucking harp and guiro solo for forty five minutes and then wonder why the music fell apart and everyone went to bed.
And I KNOW what that sounds like…
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