Early this year, I attended a cutting-edge music performance and workshop at the celebrated venue Roulette, in the heart of Brooklyn, New York, during which the ghosts of Memphis were very present. Bassist/composer Stephan Crump and I waited in a packed room to hear Ellen Fullman on the “long string instrument” and Theresa Wong on cello, electric guitar, electronics — and the music, consisting of rich, layered drones with ever-shifting overtones and textures, was certainly ghostly. But it was during the Q&A session that echoes of Memphis were most palpable, when Fullman spoke about growing up here.
As Fullman recalled the Bluff City’s indelible mark on her budding musicality, her performance at a Downtown Memphis gallery in the late 1980s suddenly made sense to me. A co-worker, the late, great Vicki Marshall, had taken me, and the experience — seeing and hearing Fullman walk along high-tension wires bolted into the gallery walls, brushing them lightly as they resonated with eerie harmonics — was transformative. But there had been no mention of Fullman’s Memphis roots back then. I had to wait until the 21st century to learn of that.
Intrigued, I called her after the Roulette show to hear the details of an unorthodox career that had taken her away from Memphis long ago, leading her to move to Minneapolis, New York, Austin, Seattle, Tokyo, and Berlin over the years. Now based in Berkeley, California, Fullman still recalls Memphis vividly.
“To begin with,” she said, “Elvis kissed my hand when I was 1 year old. My father was holding me, and Elvis kissed my hand and said, ‘Hi-ya, baby!’” Beyond that momentous event, she was exposed to alternative approaches to music that prefigured her own experimental inclinations.
“In retrospect, looking back and learning about what was going on there, I always really loved the warm sound of soul music that was produced in Memphis, like Otis Redding. He was the focal point of that. And then, as a teenager, I was learning about blues music from the British Invasion bands, you know, and being intrigued,” Fullman recalled.
“I checked out Smithsonian Folkways records from the public library,” she said, “and listened to archival recordings. And then I started to be able to see some people live. There was Little Laura Dukes, who was amazing, and I loved her. I got to hear B.B. King and Furry Lewis. So I really loved those original, early blues sounds. And I look back and I think that’s what really made me appreciate tunings that were outside of the normal equal temperament. The blues players did things with tunings, and who knows what they did exactly? But, you know, it relates to my interest in natural tuning and also in extended-technique sounds.”
Given her fascination with blues tunings, one might be tempted to compare Fullman’s long string instrument to the classic diddley bow from Mississippi folk culture. Made with baling wire nailed into a cabin wall and stretched taut, a diddley bow can serve as a sort of one-string slide guitar with an entire building as its resonator — resembling the lengths of cable Fullman strings horizontally between the walls of a large room. But the resemblance is only superficial, she explains.
“A diddley bow is a distant cousin, maybe. But in principle, it has nothing to do with [the long string instrument] because my strings are excited in the longitudinal mode, which is not employed on any other string instrument.” Without wading too deeply into the physics of sound, that means the long string instrument’s sounds are not made by the strings vibrating up and down, as in a guitar string, but by waves moving horizontally through the material of the wire itself. As Fullman discovered early on, that complicates how pitch can be manipulated.
And that made the instrument confusing when she first began, she noted at Roulette. “At that time, I didn’t understand how to tune this because I tried to tighten the string, I tried higher gauge wire, all the different things we normally do to change the tuning, and it didn’t work. So I was in the Twin Cities, and I thought, ‘There’s got to be someone who knows engineering in New York who can help me understand this,’ so I just moved to New York!”
She’d developed an interest in art while attending White Station High School. “I took a bus to the Memphis College of Art every afternoon, and I took drawing courses, and I audited in the ceramics department, which was a very strong, interesting department. I studied Asian ceramics, and it was a very high level department. I was really lucky. And then I went on to be with Ken Ferguson, who was one of the founders of the American craft movement, and the department he was in at the Kansas City Art Institute was really amazing. That’s why I went to school there.”
Shifting from ceramics to sculpture, she also became interested in performance art. At some point, “I was inspired by a piece called ‘Music on a Long Thin Wire’ by Alvin Lucier, although his piece operates on a totally different principle,” she said. “But it just gave me the idea to explore what kinds of sounds I might make with a long wire, and then I came upon this discovery accidentally.” It grew out of a single question she pondered: “What does a long string sound like if I manually manipulate it?”
By the time I saw Fullman in Memphis in 1988, she had already left home for Kansas City, then Minnesota, then New York. Back then, as I saw her walk with slow determination in a gallery strung wall-to-wall with wires, making them vibrate with her fingers, then adding overtones from other strings to create harmonies, it seemed that her art was already fully formed. In truth, she was only beginning a life practice that she’s been pursuing ever since. And that pursuit has been fruitful, with her work celebrated internationally, and in venues like Roulette.
In Fullman’s mind, though, it’s been a slow, steady climb. For the past decade or two, she’s become more interested in collaboration, such as her ongoing work with cellist/multi-instrumentalist Wong. That’s reflected her growing confidence in her command of the long string instrument.
“I always felt that it had a lot of potential, and over the years I never really felt that I reached full potential. And so that’s what has kept me focused on it,” Fullman told me. “For example, here I am in retirement years, you know, really wondering, after all these years of invention and design, what is the most appropriate way to play this instrument? What does it want to do? How do you sound it in an authentic way? How do you write notation for something that you walk while playing? There’s just so much about it that has taken a lot of time. But it has grown, and I think it has grown with my artistic voice. I think that has developed and is reaching more people now.”
For more information, visit ellenfullman.com.
