Courtney Stephens

In music, intervals represent the difference between pitches, and among them, the perfect fifth represents the highest degree of consonance; it is used as the basis for piano tuning and building harmony. For Ellis, an artist who tunes pianos by day, the interval has significance far beyond physical measurement as “a way of determining how something exists in space and time.” Traveling beyond speech and music, Stephens’s intimate film traces Ellis’s thinking about the interval as a phenomenon that offers both structure and, paradoxically, instability.

Ellis, who has stuttered since he was a young boy, has an acute awareness of intervals. They are inherent in his speech, which has, in turn, informed much of his work as a musician and composer. As we watch him tuning, Ellis shares his thoughts on intervals as well as the simultaneous strength and fragility of the piano, which is built to hold an incredible amount of tension while also being susceptible to temperature and humidity. The delicate spaces of time that he uses to bring this complicated instrument into acoustical harmony are also a way for him to consider time within his own speech, which he refers to as “the interval of silence.” For Ellis, these silences flow naturally and are imbued with power—the power to distend and swell time, to highlight and create new rhythms.

Stephens’s Super 8 footage—which, at 18 frames per second, contains its own intervals—makes connections between the act of tuning and the cycles of both the natural world and our man-made environment, bringing into focus tensions between the latter two and the entropy that can result. Perfect Fifths was made while Ellis and Stephens were artists in residence at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire along with filmmaker Joshua Gen Solondz, who served as an additional cameraperson on this project. (8 mins., Super 8mm film)