Composer/instrument builder Ellen Fullman has spent the last twenty-four years developing her unique creation, The Long String Instrument (LSI). The LSI is composed of an array of bronze wires, twenty meters or more in length, strung near waist height across the performance space and terminating in wooden-box resonators that amplify the strings' sound. It is tuned in a variety of different just tunings, depending on the composition
to be performed. The Long String Instrument is played by rubbing the strings with rosined fingertips while walking along a pathway between banks of strings. Different overtones are emphasized as the performer moves past the harmonic nodes of each string. These overtones emerge as an array of higher-pitched harmonic relationships above the fundamental tone of each string. Sometimes these variations in overtone production seem to transform a single chord into entirely different harmonies. These changes can be heard in the music as motion, almost like a river moving past, always subtly changing, yet also seeming to remain the same. The physical scale of the installation and the interactions of the overtones with the installation space turn the respective room itself into a giant musical instrument.

The sound of the LSI has been variously described as like "standing inside an enormous grand piano," "an entire orchestra," or "a giant tamboura," but all descriptions fall short of reality-you must experience the LSI up close to realize the richness and variety of its sonic pallette. Because of its space and set-up time requirements, performances on the LSI are rare events. We are fortunate to be able to present Phantom Coincidence, a new work for the LSI, as the first event on our twentieth anniversary series.

"The slightest touch releases buoyant, shimmering tones resembling a gigantic zither. Considering the visual beauty of the instrument, its tracery of bronze strings and polished, finely crafted sound boxes, its not surprising that Fullman began her career as a sculptor and ceramist."

--Gavin Borchert, Seattle Weekly


The Long String Instrument... opened up incredible musical possibilities with its amazing ability to produce unending harmonic overtones that seem to appear from every point in space.

--Rob Forman, ND magazine


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Ellen Fullman Biography
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Ellen Fullman, composer, instrument builder and performer was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1957. She studied sculpture at the Kansas City Art Institute before heading to New York in the early nineteen-eighties. In Kansas City she created and performed an amplified metal sound-producing skirt and wrote art-songs which she recorded in New York for a small cassette label. In 1981, at her studio in Brooklyn she began developing her
life-work, the 70 foot (21 meter) Long String Instrument, in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano.

Fullman, subsequently based in Austin, Texas; Seattle, Washington and now Berkeley, California has recorded and performed extensively with this unusual instrument. She was a guest of the Deutscher Akademisher Austauschdienst (DAAD) Artists-in-Berlin Program during 2000-2001. Fullman was commissioned by Other Minds for Stratified Bands: Last Kind
Words which she performed with the Kronos Quartet in the Other Minds Festival, San Francisco (2002). Her music has been represented in exhibits including: Listening, Pompidou Center, Ecoute exhibition (September 22, 2004-January 17, 2005); The American Century; Art and Culture, 1950-2000, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City; and Volume: Bed of Sound, P.S.1, Queens, and Henry Art Gallery, Seattle. Using archival
footage shot in 1994, Fullman edited a documentary film, Suspended Music, Deep Listening Band and the Long String Instrument. Suspended Music was premiered June 16, 2004 in the series, In the Key of Z, Pacific Film Archive, UC Berkeley. Isolated Reflections, a large-scale multimedia event, funded by the City of Seattle and co-produced by Consolidated Works and Non-Sequitur, was presented in Seattle, July 2004.

Fullman has performed in festivals, art spaces and museums, including: Donaueschinger Musiktage (1998), the Flanders Festival, Brussels (2003), the Low Library Rotunda, Columbia University (1998); and the Walker Art Center (1995). Fullman wrote an article on the history of her work that was published in MusikTexte (Cologne 2002), and in MusicWorks (Toronto 2003). She has been interviewed on NPR's Morning Edition, in the Wire
(June 2004) and Signal to Noise (Fall 2004).

She has been the recipient of several awards and commissions including a Subito Grant from American Composer's Forum (2004) for Isolated Fragments; an Artist Trust GAP Grant (2003) for 110, a collaboration with cellist Frances-Marie Uitti, an Artist Trust/Washington State Arts Commission Fellowship (1999); a Meet the Composer, Reader's Digest Consortium Commission (1993) for her collaboration with Deep Listening Band; a NEA Artist's Projects: New Forms Grant (1990); a NEA Visual Artists Fellowship in New Genres (1989); a Meet the Composer, Composer/Choreographer Commission (1989) for her collaboration with Deborah Hay; and a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, Performance Art/Emerging Forms (1987). She has created music for the works of several choreographers including Deborah Hay, Pat Graney and Tonya Lockyer. Fullman composed Peace Piece for Trimpin's Klavier Nonette, an installation of nine midi-controlled toy pianos.

Releases include Ort, a series of songs recorded with Berlin collaborator Jörg Hiller (Choose Records 2004); Staggered Stasis (Anomalous Records 2004); Suspended Music, in collaboration with Deep Listening Band (Periplum 1997); Change of Direction (New Albion 1999); and Body Music (XI 1992).