By Allan Kozinn

In Musical America's early years, recognizing a percussionist as Instrumentalist of the Year would undoubtedly have seemed an eccentric notion, perhaps even an inconceivable one. Yet the seeds for such an acknowledgement were sown in the first half of the 20th century, when composers as diverse as Bartók, Varèse, and Cage began rethinking the percussion battery's traditional place at the back of the orchestra, to say nothing of its long-standing role of providing punctuation and a bit of razzle-dazzle. In the second half of the century-a time that was noisy and inventive in almost equal measure-percussion ensembles flourished around the world. Solo percussionists, too, began finding a spotlight, and a handful have made careers by balancing recitals with chamber-music work (particularly in new-music ensembles).

But no percussionist-for that matter, no ensemble of percussionists-has rivaled the accomplishments of Evelyn Glennie, the 37-year-old Scottish player who is to the percussion world what Andrés Segovia and Jean-Pierre Rampal were to guitarists and flutists. Like those players, she has devoted herself to showing listeners who hadn't thought much about it that a concert on her instrument can be a supremely musical event. And a varied one, too: A Glennie recital is likely to offer both delicate counterpoint, on marimbas, vibraphones, and pitched drums, as well as barrages of sound from timpani, gongs, and congas, with every manner of texture in between.

The works she offers might touch philosophical or even political currents (Frederic Rzewski's To the Earth comes to mind), or they might be tongue-in-cheek encores (for example, her arrangements of Rimsky-Korsakov's "Flight of the Bumble-bee," or "Born to Be Wild," the classic by the rock band Steppenwolf). Attend enough of her recitals, and you're also likely to see her play the piano and sing, both of which she does pleasingly.

From an American perspective, Glennie was first known through a handful of recordings, made in Britain in the mid-1980s. One of them, a performance of the Bartók Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, with Murray Perahia and Sir Georg Solti playing the piano lines and David Corkhill sharing the percussion, won a Grammy in 1989. She won another Grammy last year for "Perpetual Motion," a crossover collaboration with Joshua Bell, Edgar Meyer, and others. It wasn't until 1994 that she gave her first United States performances, and two more years elapsed before her first appearance in New York, as the soloist in James MacMillan's Veni, Veni, Emmanuel with the New York Philharmonic-a performance that James R. Oestreich predicted, in his New York Times review, "may well stand as the most thrilling moment of the New York Philharmonic season."

These days, Glennie plays about 100 performances a year in Europe, Asia, and North and South America. Her programs are packed with works composed for her-there are 121 so far, including 47 concertos-but she has also revived works written for colleagues, and composed works of her own. Her two Grammys are among nearly 60 awards she has picked up over the last 20 years, among them a handful of honorary university degrees (she is currently at work on two new non-honorary ones, in philosophy and law) and, in 1993, the Order of the British Empire.

She has also written an autobiography, Good Vibrations, and if it seemed a bit early in her career for such an effort-she was 25 when it was published, in 1991-her main purpose in writing it was not so much to tell of her upbringing on her family farm in Aberdeen, her studies at the Royal Academy of Music, in London, which she completed when she was 19, or even her early successes.

In large part, she wrote it to answer a question that, even then, she felt she was being asked too much: how a person who has been profoundly deaf since childhood can pursue a career as a musician. (Profound deafness is a clinical term describing hearing in which sounds of less than about 95 decibels cannot be comfortably heard, and are of poor timbral quality.) Her hope was that by dealing with the issue in what she regarded as a comprehensive way, she might be able to keep the focus of future discussions on her music-making. As she has pointed out, musicians face other limitations as well: At a petite five-foot-two, for example, she would find it greatly easier to get around her often sprawling stage setups if she had longer arms and legs.

Glennie has found ways to compensate. For one thing, some of the music she plays is loud enough for her to hear, although her repertoire also includes music that is quite delicate, as well as collaborations with other musicians. Mainly, she has tapped into a faculty that musicians with full hearing also use, but only secondarily. Basically, instruments produce sound waves (which we hear as notes) that are palpable, particularly at close proximity, and which vibrate objects around them. A violinist playing a note slightly out of tune will adjust the pitch mostly by ear-but the vibrations are a factor as well.

Glennie has sensitized herself to the vibrations that the instruments in her percussion arsenal produce: When she thwacks a gong or taps a clay pot, she feels the resultant vibrations in her hands, in the air around the instrument, and through the floor of the stage, since she performs barefoot. And in her collaborations with musicians like Philip Smith, her regular piano accompanist since 1989, or Emanuel Ax, with whom she gave a series of performances in 2001, the interplay between the piano lines and Glennie's percussion can be remarkably supple.

It is not as if Glennie has put the issue at arm's length: She has, for instance, established the Evelyn Glennie National Scholarship Award Program, administered through the Children's Hearing Institute, in New York, to encourage instrumental study among deaf and hearing-impaired children. Still, in her press materials, presenters are asked not to mention her deafness in her program biography, and most don't. Critics, who have generally considered the issue newsworthy enough to require mention, have done their best to honor her wishes by mentioning her hearing only in passing, well down in the text-or increasingly, at this stage of her career, not at all-while invariably noting that her musicianship is extraordinary regardless of the circumstances.

That, in the end, is the real issue-and in some ways the real miracle. How likely was it, after all, that a critic looking back over the last several seasons could say that a handful of solo percussion recitals were among the most exciting and invigorating performances he had heard?

Allan Kozinn is a music critic for The New York Times.