Elemental View

“Elemental View” is a work in six movements by pioneering composer Ellen Fullman for her Long String Instrument and The Living Earth Show. The expansive installation inhabits an industrial sized space with 136 strings, precisely tuned and configured for this multi-movement piece. Listening to the music of Fullman’s singular creation is akin to standing inside a giant musical instrument. The result is a music at once ancient and utterly new, environmental, and folk-like yet orchestral; immersing the listener in a transportive glistening atmosphere.

“Elemental View” invites the listener to discover, as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself. Fullman bows the instrument lengthwise with her fingertips while walking, playing multiple strings at once. As she walks, upper partial tones unfold at different rates, in proportion to differences in string length, imparting an undulating wave of continually shifting overtones. The notation for the Long String Instrument contains both temporal indications and spatial choreography, as specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length.

Invention and discovery are at the core of Fullman’s work. To produce percussive sounds on the otherwise drone-based instrument, Fullman designed and fabricated the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which play three, six, or nine strings at once. Varying techniques with these tools produce either open ringing tones or closed dampened ones. With their laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing, The Living Earth Show brilliantly executes the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of Fullman’s composition.

In the movements “Environmental Memory” and “Concentrated Merry-Go-Round”, Fullman incorporates Travis Andrew’s primary instrument, the guitar. Andy Meyerson and Fullman accompany the guitar in duo playing box bow and shoveler. For “Surface Narrative in Four Parts”, Meyerson also applies his percussion mastery to the hammered dulcimer. The dulcimer’s unique tuning is derived from the extended microtonal partials of the sequence played by Fullman on The Long String Instrument.

The commission and production of this work is made possible by the Gerbode Foundation Special Award in the Arts program with additional funding from InterMusic SF Musical Grants Program.

Ellen Fullman

For over four decades, Ellen Fullman has maintained a singular focus on her project, The Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of tuned strings fifty feet or more in length which have resonated architectural spaces in festivals across the world including Tectonics, Athens, The Sydney Festival and the London Contemporary Music Festival. Through her research in just intonation tuning theory, string harmonics and musical instrument design, Fullman has developed a compositional and performative approach that expands harmonic motion through a focus on upper partial tones.

Awards include: Gerbode Foundation, Special Awards in the Arts (2020); Guggenheim Fellowship, Music Composition (2020); Foundation for Contemporary Arts Award, Music/Sound (2015); Japan-US Friendship Commission/NEA, Creative Artist Exchange Fellowship for Japan (2007); and DAAD, Artists-In-Berlin Program residency (2000). Her recordings include: Harbors (Room40, 2020) a collaboration with Theresa Wong, and The Long String Instrument (Superior Viaduct, 2015) first issued on Apollo Records in 1985 and selected as the number one reissue for 2015 by the Wire. In 2016 Fullman was the Distinguished Alumni Speaker and Guest Critic at the Kansas City Art Institute. Her work was cited by Alvin Lucier in his book, Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music (Wesleyan University Press, 2012).