Elemental View: a 100-stringed instrument creates endless possibilities”>
Ellen Fullman’s long-string instrument is the stuff of legend. Developed in the early ’80s, it consists of roughly 100 90-foot strings and is generally played by walking the length of said strings, rubbing them with rosin-coated fingers. The experience of hearing it in person has been compared to standing inside a gargantuan grand piano.
For her latest album Elemental View — a live recording of a collaborative installation with Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson’s Living Earth Show — she developed new approaches to her invention, using novel devices that allow her to play three (the box bow), six (the shovelette), and nine (the shoveler) strings at once, thus achieving unprecedented sounds with the instrument.
Elemental View is a six-part suite, each movement showcasing a different approach to the long-string instrument. On “Environmental Memory” and “Concentrated Merry-Go-Round,” for instance, Fullman and Meyerson play it using the shoveler and box bow, alongside Andrews on guitar. With these new techniques, they’re able to add percussive possibilities to the instrument that’s traditionally been used to generate colossal drones. Meyerson brings another rhythmic element to “Surface Narrative in Four Parts,” stirring a hammered Persian dulcimer called the santur into the mix.
Each of the six pieces that comprise Elemental View is self-contained, but the album is best experienced as a singular, flowing work. Only by listening to this 37-minute masterpiece in one go can one appreciate the breadth of sounds that Fullman has learned to make with her long-string instrument in the 40-odd years since she created it. The process of creating these sounds is based on a deep understanding of acoustic physics — overtone series, just intonation, fundamental transverse waves — but taking in the fruits of Fullman’s labor feels more like magic than science.
