Change of Direction

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Building and writing for an instrument of your own creation could inspire and charge the imagination to an even greater extent than having your own ensemble, if this music for long strings is anything to go by. I would like to compare and contrast two very distinct CDs for what in principle is the same quite recently-developed instrument, approached from different angles but with equal passion by Ellen Fullman, whose Change of Direction is music for the Long String Instrument, a project she has been concerned with since 1981, and Paul Panhuysen, his Partitas for Long Strings offering a studio-based summary of two decades of invention by a veteran of over 200 installations. Both artists are concerned with location in their work with long strings - a fact of life considering the logistics of performance and the size the strings need to be in order to produce an audible frequency - and both exploit the superior sustaining ability of long strings when compared with other stringed instruments. However, where Panhuysen and Fullman really part company is on the relationship of what could (perhaps inaccurately) be dubbed "extra-musical" factors to the music itself. Site, for complex reasons explained in the review of the Partitas, plays a greater role for Panhuysen than for Fullman, and his music is more radical in general, stemming as it seems to from the manipulations of musical (and real) time that push it towards the category of conceptual art. By contrast, Change of Direction feels uncontrived, organic, one event propagating the next in a continuous fifty-five-minute curve of sound that exists happily in a familiar musical dimension. Fullman has even naturalistically incorporated sonic "accidents" which have occurred during previous performances and recordings into the score, blending them seamlessly into the fabric of the music in the Train Whistle Alternate and Swingset sections. Change of Direction came into being after Fullman inverted one of her computer-drawn graphic scores in order to supply another set for Dusk to Dawn, an all-night, out-of-doors performance project: she later adapted the original backwards version of the piece to create the work as it appears here. Three performers (the composer among them) walk around and around the 90-feet long instrument, stroking, brushing or plucking the strings, guided by the score as they do so through a linear musical narrative, the tempo quite literally an easy andante (walking pace) from the opening track, the resonant Harmonic Cross Sweep, to the final evocative Swingset. The music breathes and swells, sweeping the listener along within it and advancing through a gradual shifting as absorbing as Reich at his best, though with only a hint of the mechanical during brief and welcome moments of impetus, notably in Oldies and the palindromic Nocnoca/Aconcon material. Fullman ultimately channels an entire orchestra through the Long String Instrument, conjuring up the ghosts of breathy didgeridoo, delicate mandolin, elusive Japanese koto, and more. Fifty-five minutes flies. This is one of the most marvellous discoveries I have made all summer.