Music Reviews : Ellen Fullman Plays Her Long String Instrument

There is a peculiarly American type of composer/performer, for whom the creation of music is a do-it-yourself affair from the ground up. Harry Partch and John Cage are patron saints of the musical tinkerers, whose on-going tradition is honorably represented locally by Brian Ransom and others.

Tennessean Ellen Fullman, lately of Austin, Texas, is another in this lineage. Friday she and Daniele Massie demonstrated her Long String Instrument in a Sonic Series concert at LACE, co-sponsored by the Independent Composers Association.

The Long String Instrument is just that, wire strings in three clusters running the length of the LACE performance gallery. At one end they are fastened to resonating boxes, from which comes an earthy and surprisingly loud buzzing--a sound somewhere between bagpipes and a quiescent beehive.

The strings are waist high, and easily set vibrating, as many in the audience proved after the performance. Clamps at precisely measured points give each string a pitch, in a strict proportional tuning, reflected in a graphic notation Fullman has created, which indicates both the string relationships and the movement of the performers.

Fullman’s concert was of a single, long, multi-sectional work, untitled. She and Massie paced between the string clusters like rapt acolytes in a very serious rite, stroking the strings with rosin-covered hands.

Paradoxically, her music is both intense and serene. The attractively eerie, acoustically unstable droning suggests urgency, while the slow formal development of the piece invites an intuitive, suspended-intellect sort of hearing.

The work Friday grew denser in texture, more active in rhythm throughout, then closed in a short denouement as Fullman and Massie retreated almost the length of the instrument. The nature of the instrument seems to emphasize the fundamental pitch and its nearest neighbors in the harmonic series, creating balance problems. But the dense, live sounds of a single string are complex enough to sustain a type of acoustic polyphony in themselves.