The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music is not one story but two, printed one after the other under a single title. Part I, written by Deborah Cowley, is a profile of the Scottish percussionist Evelyn Glennie, who became a world-class musician even though she is profoundly deaf. Part II tells the story of an Indian instrument, the shehnai, and of the musician who carried it onto the classical concert stage, Ustad Bismillah Khan.

The two halves are separate. They have different settings, different countries and different times, and the safest habit you can build while studying this chapter is to keep them in two clean boxes in your mind. It is easy to blend them without noticing, and a name or a place that has drifted from one half into the other turns a well-written answer into a wrong one. Ron Forbes belongs to Evelyn's story; Ali Bux belongs to Bismillah Khan's. Aberdeenshire and the Royal Academy of Music belong to Part I; Dumraon, Benaras and the Red Fort belong to Part II. If a question names a person or a place, decide first which part it comes from, and only then begin your answer.

Why put them together at all? Because both are about sound reaching people who were told it could not. Evelyn was advised to accept hearing aids and a school for the deaf, which meant accepting a quieter and smaller life; she refused, and learned to receive sound through skin and bone instead of ears. The shehnai's ancestor, the pungi, was thrown out of a royal residence for sounding unpleasant; it was reshaped by a barber who came from a family of musicians, and ended up as an instrument of blessing. In both halves an obstacle is treated as a design problem rather than a full stop. Someone changes the method, and the music continues.

Notice also the difference in form, because it changes what a good answer looks like. Part I is journalism. It reports the life of a living person, carries the actual speech of her mother and her teacher, and moves quickly from scene to scene. Part II begins like an information piece — where an instrument came from, how it was built, where it was allowed to be played — and only afterwards turns into a life story. That means Part I rewards details about people and their decisions, while Part II rewards details about history, place and dates. Read each half with the kind of question it is built to answer.

Evelyn Glennie grew up on a farm in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland, and for the first years of her life nobody suspected anything. Her hearing did not vanish in a single moment; it faded slowly because of gradual nerve damage, which is exactly why it went unnoticed for so long. Her mother, Isabel Glennie, remembered the day the truth arrived. They were waiting for Evelyn's turn to play the piano, her name was called out, and Evelyn did not move, because she had not heard it. She was eight years old.

Nothing changed at once. By the time she was eleven her marks at school had slipped badly, and it was the headmistress who urged her parents to take her to a specialist. The specialist confirmed what that moment at the piano had hinted at: her hearing was severely impaired. The advice that followed was practical and, to a musical child, devastating. She was to be fitted with hearing aids and sent to a school for the deaf. In other words, she was being offered a smaller life, and offered it kindly.

Evelyn refused that offer. She wanted an ordinary life with music inside it, not a separate life arranged around a diagnosis. The turning point came when she noticed another girl playing a xylophone and decided that she wanted to play too. Most of the teachers she approached discouraged her, and it is worth pausing on that detail, because the obstacle in this story is not only her deafness. It is also the assumption other people made about what a deaf child could not possibly do.

One teacher thought differently. Ron Forbes, a percussionist, saw her potential and changed the method rather than lowering the goal. He tuned two large drums to two different notes and told her to stop trying to listen through her ears and to sense the sound in some other way. It worked almost at once. Evelyn found that she felt the higher drum from the waist upwards and the lower drum from the waist downwards. Forbes repeated the exercise, and she went on discovering that different notes registered in different parts of her body. From that point she had a working system: her mind and her whole body, rather than her ears, were open to sound and vibration.

After that, the rest of Part I moves fast. She toured the United Kingdom with a youth orchestra. By sixteen she had decided that music would be her life, and she auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, scoring one of the highest marks in that institution's history. She joined at seventeen, moved steadily from orchestral playing to solo work, and by the end of her three-year course had taken most of the top awards the Academy had to give. The sequence matters in an answer: noticed at eight, confirmed at eleven, xylophone and Ron Forbes in between, decision at sixteen, Academy at seventeen.

The most useful idea in Part I is a simple one: sound is vibration, and ears are only one way of catching it. Evelyn worked out that her body could do the catching. This is not a poetic way of saying she imagines the music. It is a physical method, and the chapter is specific about the channels she uses.

When she plays the xylophone, the sound travels up the stick into her fingertips, so the instrument itself becomes the messenger. By leaning against the drums, she lets the resonance flow into her body. On a wooden platform she takes her shoes off so that the vibrations rise through her bare feet and up her legs. Beyond these, she describes music arriving all over her — tingling in the skin, in the cheekbones, even in the hair. This is why she plays barefoot in practice and in performance: a stage habit with an engineering reason behind it. If a question asks how she hears music, list these channels one by one rather than writing that she feels the vibrations, which is true but says almost nothing.

Once you accept the method, her career stops looking like a miracle and starts looking like an achievement. She built an enormous range as a multi-percussionist, learning a very large number of instruments, and she has collected honours in many countries, including recognition as a leading music society's soloist of the year. That award is worth a sentence of its own, because a percussionist standing alone at the front of a concert hall was an unusual sight in the first place; she had to make room for the instrument as well as for herself.

What she does with that position tells you about the person. She gives free concerts in prisons and in hospitals, and she gives serious time to classes for young musicians, so the skill is passed on rather than hoarded. She also refuses to be treated as a brave case. Her own view is plain: work hard, learn how to do the thing properly, and you can do what you want. That is a statement about method, not about magic, and it fits everything else in her story.

One point of accuracy is worth fixing here, because it is easy to get wrong. The description of Evelyn as a shining inspiration to deaf children comes from a person who works with deaf children, not from the narrator of the piece. The narrator reports the remark. When you write about the ending of Part I, say that others regard her that way, and keep the narrator's own material — the ages, the places, the interviews — separate from that judgement. Handing a character's opinion to the writer is a small slip that makes a whole answer look careless.

Part II begins long before Bismillah Khan was born, with an instrument nobody liked. The pungi was a reeded instrument — in practice a noisemaker — and the emperor Aurangzeb banned it from the royal residence because its sound was shrill and unpleasant. The ban did not kill the word. Pungi went on being used as a general name for reeded noisemakers, which tells you how common such instruments were and how low their reputation had sunk.

The rescue came from an unexpected direction. A barber, who belonged to a family of professional musicians and who had access to the royal palace, set out to improve the instrument's tone. His method was practical rather than magical. He chose a pipe with a natural hollow stem that was longer and broader than the pungi, and he made seven holes along its body. When he covered and uncovered those holes with his fingers and blew into the pipe, the sound that came out was soft and melodious — nothing like the noise that had been thrown out of the palace. He played it before royalty, and the approval was immediate.

The name follows the story. According to the account given in the chapter, the instrument was first played in the Shah's chambers and its maker was a nai, the word for a barber, and from these two things came the name shehnai. Treat this as the traditional explanation the text offers rather than as a settled fact of language history, and present it in an answer the way the chapter presents it.

What happens next is a rise in status. The sound of the shehnai came to be regarded as auspicious, which is why it is still heard in temples and why no North Indian wedding feels complete without it. The instrument was taken into the naubat, the traditional ensemble of nine instruments kept at royal courts. Even so, for a long stretch its life stayed fixed to those settings. It was played at the gate, for a ceremony, at a fixed hour — useful, respected, and never quite the point of the evening.

That limit is exactly what makes the second half of Part II matter. An instrument once thrown out of a palace for sounding bad had climbed all the way to being thought lucky, but it still had not been allowed to stand alone on a classical concert stage, with an audience that had come only to hear it. The person who took it there is Ustad Bismillah Khan, and the whole point of the earlier history is to show how far the instrument had to travel before he could do so.

Bismillah Khan was born on 21 March 1916 at Dumraon in Bihar, into a family in which the shehnai was the family trade. His grandfather, Rasool Bux Khan, played the shehnai at the court of the Bhojpur king, and his father, Paigambar Bux, along with other ancestors on the father's side, were shehnai players too. A child in such a house does not choose music. He grows up inside it.

The move that shaped him was to Benaras. At the age of three, on a visit to his maternal uncle's house, he was fascinated by the sight of his uncles playing, and he stayed close to the instrument from then on. His maternal uncle Ali Bux was employed as a shehnai player at the Vishnu temple of Benaras, and the boy began going along to the practice sessions. He would sit and listen for hours, and slowly the listening became lessons and the lessons became long daily practice.

The other teacher in this story is not a person. The temples of Balaji and Mangala Maiya, and above all the banks of the Ganga, became the places where he practised in solitude. The chapter makes a clear claim about this: the flowing water of the river pushed him to improvise, and even to invent raagas that had until then been considered beyond the range of the shehnai. This is why the Ganga is not scenery in Part II. It is presented as a source of his music, which is also why the idea of leaving it later becomes unthinkable for him.

His first public step came early. At fourteen he went with his uncle to a music conference at Allahabad, and at the end of his recital the senior musician Ustad Faiyaz Khan patted him on the back and told him that hard work would carry him through. The bigger opening came from technology. When All India Radio began broadcasting from Lucknow in 1938, Bismillah Khan's playing reached listeners who would never have entered a royal court or a temple courtyard, and he quickly became one of the most frequently heard shehnai players in the country. Radio did for him what no wedding gate ever could: it made him a national voice.

Then came the day that fixed him in the country's memory. On 15 August 1947 he became the first Indian to greet the newly free nation with his shehnai, pouring his heart into Raag Kafi at the Red Fort, before an audience that included Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru, who later delivered his famous Tryst with Destiny address. It grew into a tradition: for years afterwards his shehnai recital from the Red Fort was telecast on Independence Day, following the Prime Minister's speech to the country. An instrument that had been kept at the gate was now opening the nation's biggest day.

Recognition travelled far beyond India. Bismillah Khan performed at major venues and festivals abroad, and he was the first Indian to be invited to play at a celebrated concert hall in the United States. He appeared at a world exposition in Montreal, at an art festival at Cannes and at a trade fair at Osaka, and he became so well known in Japan that an auditorium there was named after him to mark his visit. Cinema came calling too. The film-maker Vijay Bhatt was so struck by his playing that he named a film after the instrument itself, Gunj Uthi Shehnai, and one composition from it became a hit right across the country. Even so, he worked on only two films in all: by his own account the glamour and the artificial atmosphere of that world never suited him.

The honours are easy to list and worth learning in order of weight: the Padma Shri, the Padma Bhushan and the Padma Vibhushan, and then, in 2001, the Bharat Ratna, the country's highest civilian award. Very few musicians have received it. The shehnai reached that height because one man had lifted it out of the wedding gate and set it on the concert platform, so the award is really an award to the instrument as well as to the player.

Set against all this is the part of the chapter students remember longest. A student of his in the United States asked him to head a shehnai school there and, knowing what he would miss, offered to recreate the atmosphere of Benaras around him by copying its temples. His reply turned the offer into a question: could the river Ganga be transported there as well? It is not a rude answer and it is not a rejection of the wider world — he had already played in it. It is a statement that his music and his place cannot be separated, because the river is where the music was learned.

The chapter supports this with smaller, homelier evidence. When he is away in Mumbai his mind goes to only two things, the holy Ganga and Benaras. When he is in Benaras, he misses the mattha of Dumraon, the buttermilk of the town where he was born. Belonging, in his case, works at two levels at once: the city that made him a musician, and the small town that made him a person. Both pulls are real, and the chapter lets them sit side by side without deciding between them.

There is one more thing Part II quietly does. It presents a devout Muslim musician whose instrument is played in temples, whose practice ground was the bank of a river held sacred by Hindus, and whose shehnai opened the country's first Independence Day. That is why his life is so often described as an example of India's shared culture. When you write about this, give the facts rather than the phrase alone; it is the temple duty, the riverbank practice and the Red Fort morning that make the claim believable. Bismillah Khan died in 2006, but the chapter is written in the present tense, as a portrait of a living man, and it is safest to answer in the tense the chapter itself uses.

Start with the themes, because both halves push the same ideas from different directions. The first is determination that takes a practical form. Neither half offers a lucky break as its explanation. Evelyn changes the way she receives sound; the barber changes the shape of a pipe; Bismillah Khan practises alone by a river for years. The second theme is that music is larger than the body or the background it comes from. A deaf girl becomes a soloist; an instrument thrown out of a palace becomes a sound of blessing; a boy from a small town in Bihar plays for a whole nation on its first free morning.

The third theme is the value of a guide. Ron Forbes matters not because he was kind but because he asked a better question — not can she hear, but can she sense. Ali Bux mattered because he took a small boy along to work with him, day after day, until listening turned into skill. The fourth theme is rootedness. Evelyn travels the world; Bismillah Khan will not leave the Ganga. The chapter does not rank one above the other, and neither should your answer.

On language, notice how different the two voices are. Part I moves like a magazine profile: short scenes, real speech from Evelyn, from her mother and from her teacher, and a present-tense feeling that keeps a living person alive on the page. Because so much of it is spoken by other people, attribution matters. If words belong to Isabel Glennie or to Ron Forbes, say so; do not hand them to the narrator. Part II reads more like an account: it works through dates, place names and a chain of cause and effect, which is why it converts so neatly into a timeline. If you can draw Part II as a line from the pungi to the Bharat Ratna, you can answer almost anything asked about it.

Two devices are worth naming when you write. The first is contrast, used everywhere in the chapter — noise against melody, palace against a barber's hands, silence against a full concert hall, a village temple against the Red Fort. The second is the treatment of sound as touch, which is not decoration but the actual working principle of Evelyn's career, and the reason the chapter can put a deaf musician and a shehnai master under one title without straining.

When you write, follow a simple order. Decide which part the question belongs to. Open with a direct sentence that answers it. Add two or three exact details — a name, an age, a place, an instrument, a date — because these are what separate a strong answer from a vague one. Close on the idea rather than on the incident, so the last line says what the episode means. Avoid two habits that weaken answers here: writing about Evelyn as a victim, which the chapter never does, and praising Bismillah Khan in general words without naming the Ganga, Benaras, the Red Fort or the Bharat Ratna. Finally, spell the names right. Evelyn Glennie, Ron Forbes, Deborah Cowley, Isabel Glennie, Ali Bux, Bismillah Khan, Dumraon, Benaras — a misspelt name in a literature answer looks like a fact you never really knew.