Evelyn Glennie

Evelyn Glennie grew up on a farm in Aberdeenshire in north-east Scotland. Her hearing began to fail when she was eight, and by twelve she was profoundly deaf. She had started piano lessons before the loss and was determined to keep playing music. A school percussion teacher, Ron Forbes, tuned two timpani to different notes and asked her to put her hands on the wall of the music room and feel the difference. She could.

From then on she learned to hear through her body: low notes in her legs and feet, higher ones in her face and chest. She plays barefoot to feel the floor. At sixteen she applied to the Royal Academy of Music in London, which initially doubted a deaf student could cope; she won every prize going.

There was no such thing as a solo percussionist when she graduated in the mid-1980s. Orchestras used percussionists at the back; nobody wrote concertos for them. She commissioned composers herself, toured relentlessly and in 1989 won a Grammy for a recording of Bartok with Georg Solti and Murray Perahia. More than two hundred works have now been written for her.

She was made a Dame in 2007, led a thousand drummers at the opening of the London 2012 Olympics and continues to argue that listening is something the whole body does.