The audience had to creep carefully around the performance space, as a constellation of strings were stretched at hip-height from one wall to another. Ellen Fullman had spent the day here, setting up her traveling installation, the Long String Instrument; she had stretched dozens of stainless steel and phosphor bronze strings across the room in preparation for her performance on the final night of Sixth International Conference on Music & Minimalism. The Memphis-born, Berkeley-based composer has been installing, performing, and developing the LSI in various venues around the world for over 30 years. Fullman describes her work as hinging on “the essence of string-ness and the universal spectrum of partials”: once installed, she “plays” the LSI by walking slowly among the strings, her rosin-coated fingers resting on them like a bow on a violin string. The strings resonate through the space in a confluence of tones and microtones and overtones, at once drone-like and constantly shifting.
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