Ellen Fullman — Music for the Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom (Besom Presse)
Photo by Nicolas-Joubard
music for the man who grew common in wisdom by ellen fullman
The composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch once described himself as a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry. Ellen Fullman could likewise be characterized as a sculptress beguiled by acoustics. In her senior year of art school, Fullman made a wearable sound sculpture which consisted of a metal skirt, which activated guitar strings attached to her shoes. The resulting sounds were broadcast by a small amplifier slung over her shoulder like a purse. Work with metal wires led to engagement with the sounds of those wires, which in turn led to the development of the creation you no doubt know about if you recognize Fullman’s name — the Long String Instrument.
Like Partch’s Kithara, Chromelodeon and Cloud-Chamber Bowls, the LSI is a byproduct of artistic investigation that has become a thing worth dealing with on its own terms. It comprises dozens of wires between 50 and 90 feet long, with wooden resonators at one end, which are strung in a big, open space such as an unfinished office suite or a basketball court. Fullman walks the wires’ length, stroking them with rosined fingers to draw out long pitches and radiant clouds of overtones. Its sound is the foundation and often the sole sound producer on every album that Fullman has made since the 1980s, save the one under consideration here.
In 1985, Fullman moved to Austin, Texas, to collaborate with the choreographer/dancer, Deborah Hay on a score for Hay’s performance, The Man Who Grew Common in Wisdom. Equipped with a Prophet sampling keyboard, which was one of the first such instruments that could be afforded by people who weren’t being backed by grants or major studios, Fullman drew inspiration from the multi-media work of her student years, when she sometimes made tapes of concrete sounds to accompany her sculptures and performances. She loaded the sounds of dropped bits of metal, sloshing water, tapped wood, breaking glass, and shots from a starter pistol into the keyboard’s 256K memory, and arranged them into patterns that only occasionally adhered to musical conventions. There are passages on “The Gardener,” the piece that occupies side one of this LP, that sound like unmodified field recordings of flowing water or a boat bumping against a dock, and others that sound like sped-up windchimes playing scales.
Memory wasn’t the Prophet’s only limitation; its sampling rate of 12 bits guaranteed that nothing came out of the keyboard sounded exactly the way it had going in. But in limits lie opportunities, and some of the most alluring stretches of “The Gardner” come when Fullman stacks samples of her filtered voice over a groove that sounds a bit like something Martin Denny might have made if his ensemble mutinied and he had to make do with the contents of a lumber yard. There’s another occasion of transplanted exotica on “The Aviator,” which takes up side two, that involves some plucked strings that sound like the timbral missing link between a koto and a ukulele jostling with something that might be a chorus of end-blown soda pop bottles. Elsewhere in the piece, Fullman juxtaposes blown bubbles with jitterbugging keyboard licks, gunshots, and crowd noises. One wonders how Hay moved while this stuff was playing, but there’s no doubting the sense of playful inquiry that informs this music.
