Ellen Fullman
Blue Tunnel Fields [w/ Theresa Wong]
In 1981 I began developing the “Long String Instrument,” an installation of dozens of wires fifty feet or more in length that are ‘bowed’ with rosin-coated fingers. When I first began working with this project, I didn’t know anything about Just Intonation, much less what an interval was. Over the years, I worked to smooth the timbre of my instrument, and my ear developed along the way. I incorporated more complex intervals only when I could appreciate them. In 2003 I began using a Peterson strobe tuner that calibrates to the 10th of a cent. This tool greatly helped me to clarify my intentions. Precise tuning of the fundamentals aligns the overtones into pure intervals as well. I work with the influences of sympathetic resonance and sonic events that occur at specific nodal point locations along the string-length of the instrument and have developed a unique notation system to choreograph the performer’s movements. My interest is in exploring this multi-dimensional matrix where threads of resultant melodic fragments emerge and intertwine. I feel that the room itself becomes my instrument and is open, vulnerable, or receptive to what is put into it. A large audience has a dampening effect on the central focus of my music; the overtone activity. Another instrument can generate frequencies that either drive my instrument through sympathetic resonance or have a canceling effect. Because of this, the process of collaboration is literally a physical experience. Blue Tunnel Fields uses the ratios: 1/1, 81/80, 9/8, 6/5, 5/4, 4/3, 27/20, 3/2, 27/16, and 9/5.