Few contemporary composers have created instruments as singular as Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument, and fewer still have explored its possibilities with the depth and invention documented on Elemental View. This six-movement work, performed in collaboration with The Living Earth Show, transforms an industrial-sized space into a resonating chamber where 136 precisely tuned strings create what can only be described as environmental music in its most literal sense. Fullman has spent decades developing her Long String Instrument, an installation that requires listeners to reconsider fundamental assumptions about musical space and performance. To experience her music is to stand inside a giant instrument, surrounded by strings that stretch across room-length spans and vibrate sympathetically with every movement of air and body. The result defies easy categorization—music that feels simultaneously ancient and utterly contemporary, folk-like in its directness yet orchestral in its harmonic complexity. Elemental View reveals the full scope of Fullman's instrumental thinking. Her performance technique involves walking along the strings while bowing them lengthwise with her fingertips, playing multiple strings simultaneously. This choreographed movement isn't merely theatrical but compositionally essential—specific harmonies emerge at distinct locations along the string length, creating what her notation captures as both temporal and spatial relationships.
As Fullman moves through the installation, upper partial tones unfold at different rates proportional to string length differences, generating continuously shifting overtones that create an undulating harmonic landscape. This isn't music that happens in space but music that is space, where acoustic phenomena become the primary compositional material.
The collaboration with The Living Earth Show—Travis Andrews and Andy Meyerson—adds new dimensions to Fullman's sonic architecture. Their "laser focused precision and virtuosic ensemble playing" navigates the rhythmic and harmonic complexity of compositions that exist at the intersection of performance, installation, and acoustic research.
Fullman's innovations extend beyond performance technique to instrument design itself. To create percussive sounds on her otherwise drone-based instrument, she developed specialized tools: the box bow, shovelette, and shoveler, which engage three, six, or nine strings simultaneously. These devices produce either open ringing tones or dampened attacks, expanding the instrument's dynamic vocabulary while maintaining its essential character.
The album's movements showcase this expanded sonic palette. "Environmental Memory" and "Concentrated Merry-Go-Round" incorporate Andrews's guitar, while Meyerson joins Fullman in duo performances using box bow and shoveler. "Surface Narrative in Four Parts" introduces Meyerson's santur—a Persian hammered dulcimer whose unique tuning derives from the microtonal partials of Fullman's string sequences, creating harmonic relationships that extend the Long String Instrument's resonance into new timbral territories.
Elemental View documents more than musical performance—it captures what Fullman calls "invention and discovery" at the core of experimental practice. Her work suggests that the most profound musical experiences emerge not from manipulating familiar instruments but from creating entirely new relationships between performer, instrument, and architectural space. This is music that invites listeners to discover, "as if with a magnifying glass, the details of the physics of string vibration itself," revealing the hidden acoustics that surround us daily.
