Solo percussionist Evelyn Glennie performs at Texas Christian University’s Ed Landreth Auditorium in Fort Worth.

Evelyn Glennie, the world-famous percussionist, is more than willing to talk about lots of things. She’s glad to discuss her latest recordings and her latest commissions. But there is one thing she won’t talk about, and that’s her deafness.

The Scottish-born Glennie was on the phone the other day from her office outside Cambridge, England, discussing her upcoming appearance with the Rhode Island Philharmonic. Questions were posed to an office assistant, who then repeated them to Glennie, who reads lips.

She was talking about her upcoming tour of the United States and her performance here Saturday of American composer Joseph Schwantner’s acrobatic percussion concerto.

But when talk turned to her hearing loss, Glennie balked.

“It’s not clear to me how much you hear,” said her questioner.

“It’s not clear to me either,” said Glennie. “It isn’t black or white, so I’d rather not answer that question.”

“But when you perform the Schwantner, what can you hear?”

“It’s not black or white, so I’m not prepared to answer that question,” continued Glennie. “It really depends on where you are standing on stage, which instrument you are playing, the acoustics of the hall and what mallets you are using.

“Unfortunately, I don’t analyze what I actually hear or how much I hear to answer that. It doesn’t work that way.”

Glennie instead directed her interviewer to her Web site ( www.evelyn.co.uk) where she responds to what she claims is sloppy reporting. She writes that she has learned from childhood that even if she refuses to talk about her deafness, the media will “just make it up.”

Only a “handful” of the thousands of articles and reviews written about her have been accurate, she writes.

“More than 90 percent are so inaccurate that it would seem impossible that I could be a musician.”

What her essay goes on to say is that Glennie is not totally deaf but is rather “profoundly deaf,” which means she can hear spoken words but can’t make them out without lip reading.

“In my case, the amount of volume is reduced compared with normal hearing,” she writes, “but more importantly, the quality of the sound is very poor.”

A ringing phone, for example, sounds to her like a crackle, albeit a distinctive crackle she can identify as a phone.

She relies on vibrations to help her make out music. That is one reason she most often performs barefoot, so she can feel low-pitched tones through the floor. She might sense higher sounds on parts of her chest, neck and face.

As a youngster she would place her hands against the classroom wall while her music teacher played the timpani or kettle drum.

“Eventually, I managed to distinguish the rough pitch of notes by associating where on my body I felt the sound with the sense of perfect pitch I had before losing my hearing.”

WHATEVER THE PROCESS, Glennie, 42, seems to have it down. She’s a Grammy-award winner with two dozen recordings to her credit. She is said to be the first professional classical percussion soloist in the West.

Glennie, who was born on a farm in northeast Scotland, started out on the piano when she was 8, about the time her hearing began to fade. She tried her luck with clarinet and settled on percussion at 12, when she had become deaf.

“The chemistry was good,” she said, “and I carried on with it.”

When Glennie was 16 she went to the Royal Academy of Music in London. Teachers there were at first skeptical that she could handle the courses and asked her to undergo two auditions. She convinced them she could succeed and graduated with honors in three years.

At the Royal Academy she played percussion with an orchestra; there were no classes for soloists, she said. But Glennie said she wasn’t cut out to be an orchestral player.

“I enjoyed creating my own concert programs,” she said through her interpreter. “I really wanted to have control over that and develop as a player. And I liked the independence from the orchestra.”

MOST OF THE MUSIC Glennie performs has been written for her, there being very little solo percussion music out there. To date, she has commissioned something like 148 scores. The Pulitzer Prize-winning composer John Corigliano is writing a new concerto for her that will be ready at the beginning of next year.

Glennie, who doesn’t wear hearing aids (she considers them a distraction), wasn’t sure how many instruments she plays in the Schwantner. “It’s a fair array,” she said, one that will probably take two to three hours to set up. Bongos, marimba, cymbals, xylophone and a water gong (to name a few) are spread around the stage, which means Glennie migrates throughout the orchestra during the performance. The concerto also uses numerous lighting effects.

The Schwantner was written in 1994 for New York Philharmonic principal percussionist Christopher Lamb, and Glennie has played it often.

“It’s very challenging,” she said. “It’s a great vehicle for the solo percussionist as well as the orchestral percussion players. And it’s a good combination of music that’s accessible yet has some substance. It’s full of color and there’s a little bit of theater, too, in the way it’s laid out.”

Glennie will also be making a rare appearance on the bagpipes, performing for the last couple of minutes of Peter Maxwell Davies’ An Orkney Wedding, with Sunrise.

Her own personal instrument collection numbers about 1,800 pieces, which are scattered about her residence. She owns the world’s largest timpani, and has a 30-piece Balinese gamelan, an assortment of percussion instruments. Most of the instruments she will use on her month-long tour of the United States are borrowed, though.

GLENNIE IS ALSO a motivational speaker and a jewelry designer. She is single these days, having divorced her sound engineer husband in 2003 following her much-publicized affair with conductor Leonard Slatkin, according to Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia.

She is the author of the best-selling autobiography Good Vibrations, and has collaborated with the likes of Bjork, Bobby McFerrin, Sting and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.

Asked if she were just plain tired of answering questions about her deafness, Glennie said it is more a case of her condition being “so badly talked about in the press.”

“That’s why I direct people to the essay, which is much more accurate, which is something you have to read and digest. And then you will be able to figure out why I don’t like answering questions over the phone or indeed in any context where it has to be condensed into a sentence or two.

“It’s not fair to me, and not fair to the readers.”

Evelyn Glennie performs Saturday night at 8 with the Rhode Island Philharmonic at Veterans Memorial Auditorium. Tickets range from $27-$65 with discounts for seniors and students. Call (401) 248-7000 or log onto riphil.org.

cgray@projo.com