THIS YEAR promises to be one in which Evelyn Glennie, the world-famous deaf percussionist, will break even her own already impressive records. When she appears at the Proms on August 2, Glennie will have clocked up some 100 performances this year, and led a community project at the South Bank’s Rhythm Sticks festival. And she’s about to receive an honorary degree from Edinburgh University.

At the Proms Glennie will be playing a new version of Tan Dun’s Concerto for Water Percussion and taking part in the Proms in the Park on September 11, in the company of Terry Wogan, Carl Davis and the winners of television’s Operatunity series. But the subject on which she was most eagerly voluble when I met her was the BBC Proms Young Composers Competition. All seven winners, aged between 12 and 18, will have their pieces performed at the Young Composers Concert at the Victoria & Albert Museum on the same day as the Tan Dun Prom.

One of the team of judges, Glennie was astounded by the sheer range of entries: from slick pieces for female barbershop to jazz combos; from works for string quartet with piano and clarinet to a tiny piece of perfect conjuring for two recorders. Among all the differing agendas, what was Glennie herself looking for? “I was, of course, approaching the music from a performer’s point of view, seeing how flexible each piece could be. If you lined up 20 musicians, how far would they be able to come out with something quite different in performance? I wasn’t looking for originality so much as the thoughtful juggling of ideas, so that performers could interpret, not merely translate, the score.

“Young composers are now using technology a lot. We had a high proportion of computer-generated pieces. But while a computer program like Sibelius can help experienced composers, we were seeing pieces with no real imaginative conception of how any one instrument would actually sound alongside another. There was often no awareness of the nature of the sound. That’s why it’s so important in music education to have a child creating sound hands-on.”

Small wonder that Glennie’s response to this week’s Music Manifesto from the Government is on the chilly side of lukewarm. Luminaries such as Susan Digby, the founder and director of the Voices Foundation, are excited that the Government has taken an important step in identifying music as vital to the curriculum, and Digby, for one, feels sufficiently encouraged by the Government’s record in insisting that singing become a mandatory part of the national curriculum and in delivering on that.

Glennie is more cynical. For her, the Music Manifesto, appearing just weeks before the end of term, is generating a head of verbal steam which will only too soon simmer down to the sound of silence. All promises, she feels, no funding and no structures. In fact, Glennie’s own Music Education Consortium, which has put forward several schemes for live music in schools, has just issued a statement expressing its disappointment that “there is still no commitment, after many promises of government change, in implementing these schemes”.

Glennie’s obsession with hands-on educational practice is at the heart of her new arthouse film Touching the Sound. It is directed by Thomas Riedelsheimer, and is due for release on August 20 at the Edinburgh Film Festival. Glennie feels that too few of us are patient enough to connect with the sounds all around us. “I want people to ask what is sound, and where does it go; to follow a journey in sound.”

In the film she returns to her old school north of Aberdeen, with its integrated hearing-impaired unit from which she benefited as a child.

“Although I was deaf, my percussion teacher said we had to find a way. We discovered there was a huge amount of resonance coming from the timpani. They still have the same set of drums, believe it or not; and I went back and spoke to a 15-year-old girl who claimed it was impossible for her to make music because she couldn’t hear.

“I asked her to feel the motion of the arm and the body as it swung down to the bass drum and out again. Suddenly she began to feel something. I asked her to take her hearing aid off and — exactly as happened to me — she heard less, but felt more. She could actually ‘hear’ the resonance of the drum for longer than another girl who had so-called normal hearing.”

For Glennie, it’s all a question of connecting with sound. “That’s one of the reasons I often position myself at a 90 degree angle to the audience; so they can watch the vibration of a drumskin head, not just see the shell of the drum.”

The Proms audience will see a lot more than that. Glennie is to perform a new and highly visual version of the Concerto for Water Percussion. Tan Dun, who lived through China’s Cultural Revolution, working in the fields, went on to study in America. He’s the living embodiment of this year’s Proms theme of East/West musical cross-fertilisation.

“As with a lot of Tan Dun’s music, this piece is in a state of constant change and evolution as it meets different players who inject their own ideas,” she says. “I look at it as a brand new piece of music, a totally clean slate. Tan Dun hires the equipment — the transparent tubes, bowls and pipes filled with water — and he conducts the work himself. But I’ll be creating my own version: as I get to explore the piece, I’ll be making changes.

“When you’re dealing with an element as unpredictable as water you simply don’t know what sort of sound will be produced. And, of course, the whole thing will have to be miked up.

“I spend so much of my life dealing with equipment that it will be wonderful to get my hands wet, my whole body wet. Very liberating.”

The Concerto for Water Percussion will be so much of a visual spectacle that, for once, Glennie doesn’t want to distract from it. “I don’t want to wear anything that’s flying around. I want people really to concentrate on the movement of the water itself. I’ve asked a young designer from Birmingham, called Terry Eleftheriou, to come up with a simple top and trousers.”

And will Glennie be splashing out on anything for those famously bare feet? A pair of designer wellies, perhaps? “Well, now there’s an idea!”