The buzzing hum of Ellen Fullman’s Long String Instrument engulfs its surroundings. As the composer walks in a stately manner between parallel arrays of 70-foot steel and bronze strings, her rosin-coated fingers gently stroking the thin wires, rapturous drones emerge, the tones enfolding each other like tiny fibers being spun into yarn. Wooden resonators are attached to the metal strands, allowing even the most subtle gesture of her hand to fill the air around her. The Instrument, which Fullman invented in 1980, is capable of transforming a room into a resonating body, its contours and contents vibrating along with the strings as they activate the entirety of the space. It often takes up to five days of calibrating and tuning until the instrument matches the reverberant qualities of wherever it is being installed. It is quite literally tied to its environment.
Fullman’s invention is surprisingly versatile given its simple design, and she has performed and recorded with musicians across the avant-garde spectrum, including Pauline Oliveros and members of her Deep Listening Band, guitar duo Barn Owl, percussionist Sean Meehan, and cellist Okkyung Lee. It is another cellist, Theresa Wong, that has been Fullman’s most consistent foil, and Harbors, their first album as a duo, is the culmination of over a decade of steady collaboration. The enveloping nature of the Long String Instrument provides a unique challenge to those who accompany it, and Wong tends to position herself in a supporting role, coloring the drones with swells of low-end, wisps of high-pitched harmonics, and punctuating thrums of pizzicato. Rarely does she attempt to tease out melodies from within Fullman’s rich, harmonically complex chord clusters, making the music less traditionally accessible but enhancing its mystery and subtlety.
The first and third parts of Harbors are predominantly dense, with Fullman demonstrating the expansive capabilities of the Long String Instrument as Wong’s cello fits snugly inside its drones. As “Part 1” ends it begins to unravel, you can hear Fullman shuffle across the floor as Wong responds to each sweep of the Long String Instrument with mournful harmonics, foreshadowing a more sparse “Part 2.” The second movement, quiet and dissonant, features both Fullman and Wong plucking the strings of their instruments, the sharp sounds reverberating in markedly different ways throughout the room. This contrast, felt as Fullman once again begins her deliberate march across the room at the beginning of “Part 3,” is almost shocking as the space suddenly comes alive with sound.
Harbors was inspired by the confluence of nature and commerce in the San Francisco Bay. The vast, undulating sound of the Long String Instrument evokes the dual rolling of fog and waves, and the rumble of passing ships can be heard as Wong slowly tugs her bow across the cello’s lower strings. But the album feels more nuanced than a simplistic one-to-one musical translation of the soundscape of the Bay—its three unique parts provide a murkier narrative that seems self-contained. What comes through is the sense of awe that arises when staring off past the water’s edge, and its relative stillness in an otherwise urban environment, as it is transmitted through suspended strings and fills the performance space. While other minimalist composers have cosmic ambitions, Fullman’s music is terrestrial, rooted not only in the inspiration she takes from her surroundings but also firmly bound to the place in which it is realized.
A recording is an imperfect conduit for the power of the Long String Instrument. That isn’t to imply that Harbors is deficient as a composition or that the performances are somehow lacking, but rather that music that invokes such a dramatic physical presence feels different when being heard on speakers at home, or even the more immersive sonic environment of headphones. However, in a time when most of us are confined to very specific spaces, the same ones we’ve likely been in for months, there’s power in music that asks us to place ourselves elsewhere, exploring other spaces with our minds. Harbors might feel one step removed from its ideal setting, but in a time of isolation and physical stasis it feels like an escape to inhabit these sounds as they saturate the air in a permeating cloud of overtones, wherever you may be.
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