pssst: PIANO I

Ellen Fullman (1957) is an American composer and performer. After graduating from the Kansas City Art Institute with a degree in sculpture, she began developing The Long String Instrument project in 1980 at her studio in St. Paul, Minnesota. The following year, she moved to Brooklyn. Inspired by composer and instrument designer Harry Partch and Alvin Lucier’s work Music on a Long Thin Wire, she created an extensive work producing drone-like, organ-like overtones that are as unique in the world of sound as her own vision of the instrument.

American composer Ellen Fullman has long devoted her work to exploring just intonation, the overtones of strings, and the physics of sound itself. Based on this research, she developed her own instrument, The Long String Instrument—a system of strings tens of meters long, stretched across a space and tuned using just intonation.

The instrument produces a tone exceptionally rich in overtones and allows one to hear subtle harmonic relationships that often remain hidden on conventional instruments.

The instrument is custom-built for each performance to fit the space in which it is played, and its construction and tuning take at least three days. It requires a room at least 16 metres long, and the tensioning of the strings requires a pulling force on the order of hundreds of kilograms.

Some say that listening to The Long String Instrument is like experiencing a concert from inside a piano.

The performer plays the instrument by walking along the strings and gently running her fingers along their entire length – she plays the instrument using a longitudinal stroke, unlike the transverse stroke used by all other stringed instruments.

Depending on the point of contact, different harmonic tones are produced, arising from the proportional divisions of the string’s length. When playing multiple strings simultaneously, these overtones begin to overlap and create slowly shifting chordal fields, in which the harmony seems to constantly shift and flow depending on the performer’s movement through the space.

On traditional string instruments such as the guitar or cello, all strings have the same length, and therefore their harmonic tones appear at the same positions. On the LSI, the strings have different lengths; when playing multiple strings simultaneously, their harmonic tones overlap and create layers that are difficult to predict precisely, yet are extraordinarily rich and rewarding to listen to.

Ellen Fullman develops her compositions by playing the instrument and recording her own performances. At the heart of her musical thinking lies a fascination with the very vibration of a string and the way in which simple physical principles can create surprisingly rich sound structures. Her music thus draws attention to the subtle inner laws of sound and, at the same time, to the beauty of the structure of the universe in which we live.

Slovak premiere, 60 min
2026
no language barrier