JACK Quartet, Ellen Fullman, Konrad Sprenger

Music Portrait

Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection
septembersept 25

1/3

World premiere

1h

Information and booking to follow

Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

Thursday september 25

Ellen Fullman, Energy Archive 2, for long string instrument and the JACK Quartet (2025), commissioned by the Festival d’Automne à Paris.

JACK Quartet: Christopher Otto violin, Austin Wulliman violin, John Pickford Richards viola, Jay Campbell cello
Ellen Fullman long string instrument

Pinault Collection and the Festival d’Automne à Paris present this concert as a co-production.

For many years, Ellen Fullman has been walking between long, tuned strings, rubbing her resin-coated fingers along them to bow-like effect. The intensity of this contact with her hands enables her to feel their minutest vibrations and to summon up an infinite range of notes from within the realms of sound. In collaboration with the strings of the JACK Quartet and the electronic music of Konrad Sprenger, this unique instrument also forms part of the installation.

In 1983, in New York, Ellen Fullman performed her first Long String Instrument, in conjunction with a group exhibition. From then on, she has always paid considerable attention to her choice of material, ranging from the length and tension of the strings, set at waist height, to the relationship between the different sounds and the efficiency of the resonator boxes that make them audible. At the crossroads between composition and performance art, her work is a sensory and emotional experience in which time seems suspended and yet vibrates with the passing of each instant. Body, hand and feet are in tune with the slightest resonance. Music becomes a form of sculpture and generates a unique space, as if we were in the very heart of a violin, viola or cello. This explains why both a string quartet and a network of electronic sensors find their way into the Long String Instrument with such ease. The term “sympathetic strings” used in acoustic music seems fitting here.

JACK Quartet, Natacha Diels

Music Portrait

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In Beautiful Trouble, devised for and with the JACK Quartet, Natacha Diels does away with the dividing line between life and the work itself, electrifies the saturation of the times we live in and plays around with the hypnotic omnipresence of images. At the crossroads between performance art and installation, this chamber opera for the eyes and ears draws upon text, gesture, electronics and video in order to probe our most vivid emotions.

Théâtre de la Ville – Les Abbesses

novembernov 23

JACK Quartet, Georg Friedrich Haas

Music Portrait

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In our modern-day existences, finding ourselves so constantly under the presence of lights has meant that we have lost all sense of the dark and darkness. Georg Friedrich Haas draws upon this observation In iij Noct, a string quartet performed in absolute darkness. Enveloping us with sound, it results in our experience of time being overturned, as well as the rhythms of our body, and our relationship with others and listening.

In the same place

Bourse de Commerce – Pinault Collection

septembersept 25

Music

For many years, Ellen Fullman has been walking between long, tuned strings, rubbing her resin-coated fingers along them to bow-like effect. The intensity of this contact with her hands enables her to feel their minutest vibrations and to summon up an infinite range of notes from within the realms of sound. In collaboration with the strings of the JACK Quartet and the electronic music of Konrad Sprenger, this unique instrument also forms part of the installation.