05.22.11 - 7:00pm

ELLEN FULLMAN @ 110 LIVINGSTON: with Monique Buzzarté, Theresa Wong, David Douglas, & Sean Meehan

Ellen Fullman installs her Long String Instrument at 110 Livingston
Performances at 3 PM & 7 PM
Note: Separate admission to 3pm and 7pm performances.

Ellen Fullman, composer, instrument builder, and performer, will perform on her life-long work the Long String Instrument, where multiple strings are held tight across an entire room. Originally developed in the early 1980s in her Brooklyn studio, Fullman brushes rosin-coated fingers across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to standing inside an enormous grand piano. Installed for a special event at ISSUE’s future home, 110 Livingston in Downtown Brooklyn, the reverberant and visually stunning jewel-box theater at will amplify this transcendent two-set event.

7PM Program:

Collaborative duet with trombonist Monique Buzzarté
“Never Gets Out of Me” duet for cellist Theresa Wong
Collaborative compositions by Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong and David Douglas
“Through Glass Panes” featuring “box bow” performed by David Douglas and Thersa Wong
Collaborative duet with Sean Meehan

Ellen Fullman, composer, instrument builder and performer was born in Memphis, Tennessee in 1957. In 1981, at her studio in Brooklyn she began developing her life-work, the 70 foot (21 meter) Long String Instrument, in which rosin-coated fingers brush across dozens of metallic strings, producing a chorus of minimal organ-like overtones which has been compared to the experience of standing inside an enormous grand piano. She has recorded extensively with this unusual instrument and has been the recipient of numerous awards, commissions and residencies including: McKnight Visiting Composer Residency in Minnesota (2010); Center for Cultural Innovation Grant (2008); Japan/U.S. Friendship Commission/NEA Fellowship for Japan (2007); and DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program residency (2000). Releases include: Fluctuations, with trombonist Monique Buzzarté (Deep Listening Institute), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2008 by The Wire (London) and awarded an Aaron Copeland Fund for Music Recording Program Grant and Ort, recorded with Berlin collaborator Jörg Hiller (Choose Records), selected as one of the top 50 recordings of 2004 by The Wire. A documentary short on Fullman, 5 variations on a long string, directed by Peter Esmonde was premiered at the SXSW Film Festival in 2010 and is currently making film festival rounds. Empty Building, a documentary by Swiss filmmaker François Boetschi on Fullman’ s collaboration with Jörg Hiller is currently in production.

Monique Buzzarté, trombonist/composer, is an avid proponent of contemporary music, commissioning and premiering many new works for trombone alone, with electronics, and in chamber ensembles in addition to her own compositions of solo, chamber, and electronic works. Her latest project, underwritten by a MAP Fund grant and scheduled to premiere next season, is a collaboration with Frances White exploring the relationships between the trombone and the shakuhachi, two ancient micro-tonal wind instruments both transcending notions of fixed temperament.

Ms. Buzzarté’ s recording of Fluctuations with Ellen Fullman (Deep Listening 38) was hailed by the Wire magazine as one of the Top 50 Records of 2008. Other recordings include Assemble.Age! (Mutable Mustic 17540-2), Keep Going: The Music of Elias Tanenbaum (Ravello Records RAEL 7807), Holding Patterns with Kristin Norderval as Zanana (Deep Listening 30), John Cage’s Five3 with the Arditti Quartet on John CAGE: Vol. 19 – The Number Pieces 2 (Mode 75), Dreaming Wide Awake with the New Circle Five (Deep Listening 20), and To Know and Not to Know (Tzadik 8036). In recognition of her long history of commissioning and premiering new works to expand the trombone repertoire Ms. Buzzarté was selected by Meet the Composer for their “Soloist Champions” program. An author and educator as well as a performer/composer, she is the editor of the forthcoming Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening. Monique designed and developed an interactive performance interface for the trombone, and her advocacy work for women in music included coordinating the efforts leading to the admission of women members into the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra in 1997. Ms. Buzzarté is certified to teach the meditative improvisation practices of Deep Listening.

Theresa Wong is a cellist, vocalist, composer and improviser whose work encompasses music, theater and the visual arts. Bridging areas of musical and visual expression, Wong seeks to find the opportunity for transformation in each work for both the artist and receiver alike. Her current projects include: O Sleep, a multi-faceted improvised opera which explores the conundrum of sleep and dream life and The Unlearning, a collection of songs for cello, violin and two voices inspired by Francisco Goya’s Disasters of War etchings. Her compositions include Castings performed by sfSound, Meet Me at the Future Garden performed with the Magikmagik* Orchestra for Performa 09′s Music for 16 Futurist Noise Intoners, What Orbs! premiered by Luciano Chessa at the San Francisco Conservatory and Call It Culture a duo for two cellos performed by Joan Jeanrenaud and herself. Wong was invited by dance visionary Anna Halprin to perform a leading vocal role in Spirit of Place, a site-specific performance honoring Stern Grove. She is also a cast member on cello, voice and piano in Carla Kihlstedt’s Necessary Monsters theater project. In addition, she has collaborated with such artists as Fred Frith, Kanoko Nishi, Joelle Leandre, Gianni Gebbia and ROVA Saxophone Quartet. Her performances have been included at the Fondation Cartier in Paris, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco, Festival Internacional de Puebla, Mexico, Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria, Other Minds Brink series in San Francisco, Radio France broadcast, A L’improviste and at The Stone in New York City. Wong currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area. More info can be found at: http://www.theresawong.org/index.html

David Douglas was born in Greenville, South Carolina and grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. He studied percussion at the University of North Texas, receiving a Bachelor of Music in Performance from that institution in 1999. From 1999 to 2009, he performed most notably as a drum set player with a wide variety of artists and bands including Mandarin, The Baptist Generals, Kelley Stoltz, John Vanderslice, Cursive, Tommy Guerrero, and Mark Eitzel. He has appeared on recordings for a variety of labels including Barsuk, Bella Union, 54/40 or Fight!, Two-Ohm Hop, and C-level productions. Currently in the MFA program at Mills College, Douglas has studied composition, percussion and improvisation with Fred Frith, Roscoe Mitchell, Chris Brown, and William Winant. He performed Through Glass Panes with Ellen Fullman at the Berkeley Art Museum in 2009.

Sean Meehan’s music practice began in the late 80′s at the amica bunker series for improvised music, then housed at the Anarchist’s Switchboard and later ABC No Rio in New York City. For nearly 20 years he has collaborated with Tamio Shiraishi on their annual summer concert series. This project, which explores the social construction of space, invites its audience off of the city’ s mercantile grid and into elusive spaces that are commonly overlooked and unwatched. In 2007 an expanded version of the endeavor that included Ikuro Takahashi and radical cartographer Denis Wood was exported to the United Kingdom for a tour produced by Arika Heavy Industries. Meehan also creates object-based discursive compositions for speculative listening, such as: Field Recordings, Vol 3, a letterpress folio of aural suggestions; audio, a boxed set of four cassettes without sound; and the recent Meehan Reads Helmholtz, a book on tape, of sorts.

Photo by John Fago