Ellen Fullman & Pauline Oliveros

Women & Their Work presented a collaborative project of the Deep Listening Band and the Long String Instrument Band, featuring new works by Pauline Oliveros and Ellen Fullman. Both works were composed specifically for this ensemble.

The instrumentation included Fullman’s Long String Instrument, Oliveros’s expanded accordion, and Dempster’s virtuoso trombone and didjeridu as well as David Gamper’s voice, spatial distribution, manipulation and sound design, timbral transformation, and technical coordination. A performance tour included New York City and Seattle.

Long String Instrument band performers: Ellen Fullman, Elise Gould, Nigel Jacobs, and Rocio Balderas.

Deep Listening Band performers: Stuart Dempster, David Gamper, and Pauline Oliveros.

Lighting design by Eleanor Savage. The Wednesday benefit performance supported Tina Marsh’s medical fund.

About the Artists

Ellen Fullman, an Austin artist, has presented her work in museums, art spaces, and universities throughout the U. S. and Europe. Over a fourteen year period, she collaborated with engineers and musical instrument builders, experimenting with wire, resonator boxes and tuning systems, to create a 120 string installation which produces a startlingly original, rich sound and creates a stunning visual environment, filling her warehouse studio space. High Performance Magazine stated: ”The marvelously labyrinthine harmonies resonated in the vast warehouse … The Long String Instrument is so large and resonant that it creates an inescapable sensation that the whole room is a titanic violin-piano, with the audience inside it.”

Since the 1960’s Pauline Oliveros’ work with improvisation and electronics has placed her on the forefront of the international music scene. The purpose of The Deep Listening Band is to explore alternative listening strategies, unusual acoustic environments, expanded instrument technologies, and new relationships with audiences. The band is noted for its exploration of unusual spaces, as exemplified by their CD’s “Deep Listening”, ”The Ready Made Boomerang”, and ”Troglodytes Delight”, recorded respectively in an underground cistern and a limestone cave.

Fullman received a prestigious Meet The Composer/Reader’s Digest Consortium Commission for ”Texas Travel Texture.” Oliveros was awarded a commission from The National Endowment for the Arts for “Epigraphs In The Time of AIDS.”