“What’s the Long String Instrument?” my Lyft driver asked when he picked me up from the Albany-Rensselaer Train Station. I told him it’s a contraption of strings, invented by Ellen Fullman, that are pulled taught across a room, transforming the hall into one giant string instrument in which the audience sits; an experiment with resonance and timbre; a means of entering the inside of an instrument and peering into the parts that make it whole. He said it seemed cool that you could make a concert hall a viola. I agreed. And then, I dropped my purple suitcase at the Troy Best Western, ate a hot sandwich from a pub down the street, and pulled myself up a giant hill to arrive at EMPAC. I sat for the first time in front of the instrument, whose simultaneous immensity and simplicity seemed like the greatest contradiction I could imagine. I was in awe. The endless intrigue of the instrument lies in its embrace of that paradox: It is unimaginably huge and it is also barely there. But hear it in a room and you will remember its resonant rainbow long after the last ring.
I have since seen the Long String Instrument two more times, and the last — Fullman in a duo with Theresa Wong at Roulette last Friday — proved the most special. Fullman and Wong’s duo has that magical quality that is somewhat indescribable; an intuition only possible by two people who love music in the same way. That intuition came to life on their 2020 album, Harbors, on which Wong’s open harmonics and Fullman’s Long String Instrument mesh into one, foggy, seabound sound. Their Roulette premiere, Soundless, expanded on that style, and also went into new territories primarily driven by crackling electric guitar textures. It was an evening of experimentation, but also one that called into question the very idea of perception. Were we hearing the cello’s airy harmonics, or was that the highest pitch on the Long String Instrument? Was it a guitar pulse or the “shoveler” block Fullman brushed against the metal? It’s impossible to know, and that’s what makes it all so entrancing.
Though Wong and Fullman were seemingly in a constant state of experimentation on their respective instruments, they were always in sync, following each and every motion with keen attention. When Wong began to pull her bow quickly across the cello’s strings, Fullman moved from a slow, careful walk to a trot, and the Long Instrument followed with a razor-sharp blaze. When Fullman began to pull the Instrument’s vertically hanging ends down, creating a metallic blare, Wong responded with more vigor.
For most of the evening, I sat with my eyes shut, letting the sound swirl around me. I got lost in the meditative hum of their long-held, mid-range pitches, and then get shocked out of it when they let the edges get a little more rough. I found some tears in the corners of my eyes when the whole piece shifted into a sparkling major for a glorious moment. And while the instrument is itself large, and long, it was also an intimate concert, largely because of the music’s ability to drive me deep into myself and then pull me back into reality.
When the final note finished, and the standing ovation ended, the audience pooled at the stage to look at the instrument. My friends and I joined them, counting its strings, staring at its wooden pegs. What are the stones tying the strings to the floor? More importantly, what have they seen on their travels? And can we get a picture? No, the strings are invisible unless we get even closer, and an iPhone won’t pick it up. Just the same as when I saw it in Troy, or at Artists Space last April, but always just a little different, a little changed. Remember, music is alive — let us listen, and listen, and listen again.