Calling the striking Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie a classical soloist hardly does her justice. How many other classical musicians have appeared on MTV’s Unplugged or co-written an alternative hit with Iceland’s eccentric rebel-vocalist Bjork?

Since Bjork can’t read music very well, recording “Oxygen” required Glennie to improvise, a skill set woefully lacking in the classical world. But not for Glennie. She just released Shadow Behind the Iron Sun, an album of improvised percussion, and will give a completely improvised concert in July. “This is practically unheard of for a classical musician,” Glennie says in an e-mail interview.

Then again, Glennie has never been conventional. The first lady of percussion happens to be profoundly deaf. She can usually hear muted sounds when someone is speaking in a quiet room but can’t understand the words without lip reading. Yet her aural limitations didn’t stop her from turning to music at the age of 12. To compensate, Glennie learned to detect the pitch of sound vibrations. For example, she can distinguish the rough pitch of a note by associating where on her body she feels a particular vibration. In this way, Glennie can use her whole body to determine pitch, including her trademark bare feet.

This finely tuned method of perceiving sound vibrations may give her an advantage over other musicians. Glennie can actually detect how humidity affects a room’s acoustics. “The difference in sensation between cymbals and a huge orchestral bass drum is enormous,” Glennie says. “So some sounds attack your body better than others, depending on the acoustic. Some sounds need a dry hall and others work well in a reverberant one.”

Unlike Bjork, Glennie breaks the mold out of necessity. “I have to play 20th century music in order to survive! We do not have a Mozart marimba concerto or such like, so the fact that I have commissioned over 90 pieces so far is because I want to and have to! The first marimba concerto was written in 1940, and the first percussion concerto was in the late 1920s, so you can see the need to build the repertory.”

Guess you can’t keep a good beat down.

Evelyn Glennie performs with the Houston Symphony, Saturday and Monday, May 27 and 29, 8 p.m., Sunday, May 28, 2:30 p.m., Jones Hall, 615 Louisiana. $20-$58. For more information, call (713)224-7575.

This article appears in May 25-31, 2000.