Evelyn Glennie, Doctor of Music
Fortunately, when as a child in Scotland you said you wanted to become a solo percussionist no one told you it had never been done. You were free then to graduate as the top student at the Royal Academy of Music, win a Grammy with your first recording, and go on to dazzle audiences in more than one hundred appearances each year, performing alone, or in front of the world’s greatest orchestras, or in somewhat less rarified venues such as Sesame Street and David Letterman. You are a force of nature in the advancement of percussion, commissioning more than a hundred new works and acquiring more than eighteen hundred instruments, from a simple snare drum (your avowed favorite) and kitchen utensils to a modified car muffler. No object seems safe from your active hands. On stage your dynamic and musical control of all before you, from the most gentle to the most thunderous of drum rolls, gives new meaning to the term “musical theater.” Your gift is to feel music at a deep level of your body and to draw your audiences into the same visceral experience.
I hereby declare you recipient of the honorary degree of Doctor of Music, entitled to all the rights, honors, and privileges appertaining thereto.
June 5, 2005