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Austin360 blogs > Austin Arts: Seeing Things > Archives > 2010 > March > 16 > Entry
Review: Ellen Fullman and the Long String Instrument
Venue and performer synched perfectly Sunday night when experimental composer and instrument creator Ellen Fullman brought her 100-foot Long String Instrument to the Seaholm Power Plant, a defunct 1930s power plant in downtown Austin.
Hosted by the New Music Co-op, Fullman installed her Long String Instrument in the Seaholm’s towering turbine hall — its cavernous corners, abandoned industrial fittings and dust-caked windows dramatically lit by lighting designer William Meadows.
Atmosphere is everything for Fullman, a self-taught musician who began her career as a sculptor (and who created the Long String Instrument when she lived in Austin from 1985 to 1997).
Yes, there’s the resonance from the enormous venue that accentuated the almost ethereal sound of Fullman’s instrument. But the visuals and the environmental - and the audience interaction with both — played an equally strong part in the 90-minute performance.
Coating her hands with rosin, the petite Fullman walks like a tight rope performer, one foot carefully in front of the other as she moves the length of her instrument, vibrating its long strings as she slowly moves.
And as if to acquaint the audience to exactly what she was doing, Fullman started with “Event Locations, No. 2” a solo piece she played with tiny surveillance cameras attached to each of her wrists. The detail of her hands on the strings projected in black-and-white on a wall several yards away.
The magnificient ‘Adaptations from Stratified Bands: Last Kind Word’ was a re-setting for of Fullman’s epic piece composed in 2002 for the Kronos Quatret. Fullman was joined by New Music Co-op members James Alexander (violin), Henna Chou (cello) and Travis Weller (violin) whose fixed string instruments provided a kind of tonal grounding against the ethereal bent pitches of the Long String Instrument. Fullman used as a starting point for the piece a haunting 1930s blues song which echoed throughout.
Weller and Nicke Hennies joined Fullman on the box bow — the boxes are handle-held rhythmic devices used to play Fullman’s string instrument more rhythmicall — for ‘Time Crossing.’ Developed as Fullman’s homage to the sound of the harmonica in folk music, the box bow created repeated rhythms that jigged along sounding also sometimes like an accordion or a pump organ or a harmonium or a couple of banjoes or even the vestiges of marching band heard from a distance.
Its simple harmonies — characterized by big wide open fourths and fifths — bore the unmistakable sounds of early American folk music, at once joyous and plaintive and nostalgic.
Though there were seats for the sold-out audience of 250 (the second of two shows last weekend), people were invited to move quietly around the vast turbine hall. And wander they did, some slipping off to far corners, others drawing closer to the musicians. One woman danced free form. A woman and her young daughter paraded the perimeter of the crowd for a while quietly swinging hands.
As shadows in the industrial setting grew deeper as the night outside darkened, the audience only seemed to grow more engaged. As the last sounds resonated resonated, people seemingly froze for a moment — venue, musicians and audience by then in perfect synch.
Photos by Dell Hollingsworth.
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