NCERT Class 9 English The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music

Part I

Evelyn Glennie Listens to Sound

without Hearing It

BEFORE YOU READ

• “God may have taken her hearing but he has given her back something extraordinary. What we hear, she feels — far more deeply than any of us. That is why she expresses music so beautifully.”

• Read the following account of a person who fought against a physical disability and made her life a success story.

1. RUSH hour crowds jostle for position on the underground train platform. A slight girl, looking younger than her seventeen years, was nervous yet excited as she felt the vibrations of the approaching train. It was her first day at the prestigious Royal Academy of Music in London and daunting enough for any teenager fresh from a Scottish farm. But this aspiring musician faced a bigger challenge thanmost: she was profoundly deaf.

2. Evelyn Glennie’s loss of hearing had been gradual. Her mother remembers noticing something was wrong when the eight-year-old Evelyn was waiting to play the piano. “They called her name and she didn’t move. I suddenly realised she hadn’t heard,” says Isabel Glennie. For quite a while Evelyn managed to conceal her growing deafness from friends and teachers. But by the time she was eleven her marks had deteriorated and her headmistress urged her parents to take her to a specialist. It was then discovered that her hearing was severely impaired as a result of gradual nerve damage. They were advised that she should be fitted with hearing aids and sent to a school for the deaf. “Everything suddenly looked black,” says Evelyn.

3. But Evelyn was not going to give up. She was determined to lead a normal life and pursue her interest in music. One day she noticed a girl playing a xylophone and decided that she wanted to play it too. Most of the teachers discouraged her but percussionist Ron Forbes spotted her potential. He began by tuning two large drums to different notes. “Don’t listen through your ears,” he would say, “try to sense it some other way.” Says Evelyn, “Suddenly I realised I could feel the higher drum from the waist up and the lower one from the waist down.” Forbes repeated the exercise, and soon Evelyn discovered that she could sense certain notes in different parts of her body. “I had learnt to open my mind and body to sounds and vibrations.” The rest was sheer determination and hard work.

4. She never looked back from that point onwards. She toured the United Kingdom with a youth orchestra and by the time she was sixteen, she had decided to make music her life. She auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music and scored one of the highest marks in the history of the academy. She gradually moved from orchestral work to solo performances. At the end of her three-year course, she had captured most of the top awards.

5. And for all this, Evelyn won’t accept any hint of heroic achievement. “If you work hard and know where you are going, you’ll get there.” And she got right to the top, the world’s most sought-after multipercussionist with a mastery of some thousand instruments, and hectic international schedule.

6. It is intriguing to watch Evelyn function so effortlessly without hearing. In our two-hour discussion she never missed a word. “Men with bushy beards give me trouble,” she laughed. “It is not just watching the lips, it’s the whole face, especially the eyes.” She speaks flawlessly with a Scottish lilt. “My speech is clear because I could hear till I was eleven,” she says. But that doesn’t explain how she managed to learn French and master basic Japanese.

Thinking about the Text

I. Tick the right answer.

1. The (shehnai, pungi ) was a ‘reeded noisemaker.’

2. (Bismillah Khan, A barber, Ali Bux) transformed the pungi into a shehnai.

3. Bismillah Khan’s paternal ancestors were (barbers, professional musicians).

4. Bismillah Khan learnt to play the shehnai from (Ali Bux, Paigambar Bux, Ustad Faiyaaz Khan).

5. Bismillah Khan’s first trip abroad was to (Afghanistan, U.S.A., Canada).

II. Answer these questions in 30–40 words.

1. Why did Aurangzeb ban the playing of the pungi?

2. How is a shehnai different from a pungi?

3. Where was the shehnai played traditionally? How did Bismillah Khan change this?

4. When and how did Bismillah Khan get his big break?

5. Where did Bismillah Khan play the shehnai on 15 August 1947? Why was the event historic?

6. Why did Bismillah Khan refuse to start a shehnai school in the U.S.A.?

7. Find at least two instances in the text which tell you that Bismillah Khan loves India and Benaras.

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 9 English The Sound of Music