Lea Bertucci and Norbert Rodenkirchen: The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity
Description
Experimental composer Lea Bertucci presents her new composition, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, a striking work for sampled and live archaic flutes unfolding within an eight-channel spatial audio environment.
Crystalline in texture yet richly dissonant, the composition draws from folkloric and early music traditions to create a haunting meditation on time, duration, and memory that evokes the primeval and the futuristic simultaneously. Reaching across centuries of musical history, The Days… channels ancient sonic practices into a contemporary experimental framework, forging a stunning encounter between historical performance and contemporary sound art.
The work was written for master flutist and early music scholar Norbert Rodenkirchen, a major player in the early music world as a member of the legendary ensembles Sequentia and Dialogos, among others. Rodenkirchen’s remarkable collection of flutes, assembled over decades, features rare instruments seldom heard in modern performance, spanning the Renaissance, Medieval, and even Neolithic eras. Bertucci orchestrates The Days… with five of these instruments: Medieval traverso, swan bone, sheep bone, Renaissance tenor, and Renaissance bass flutes. Rather than live processing these instruments, Bertucci uses pre-recorded samples of each instrument which are then deployed live across an eight-speaker array, creating a spatialized field of resonant drones, melodic fragments and psychoacoustic textures.
Rodenkirchen performs live fragments of ancient songs and improvisations connected to the origins of the instruments themselves. Sustained tones and a distinctive isopolyphonic interplay between live flute and electronic diffusion define the work’s form. Pulsing drones circulate through the multi-channel system, forming a lush, dissonant sonic bed over which the flute appears to contract and expand the point of live origin into a diffuse, architectural presence throughout the space. Through this interplay of ancient timbres, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity invites listeners into a new mode of listening that traces the depths of musical history while reflecting on our contemporary upheavals, offering visions of sublime beauty within the wreckage of the present.
Presented in partnership with The Renaissance Society.
About Lea Bertucci
Lea Bertucci is an experimental musician whose works revolve around electronic and spatial extensions of instrument and voice. In addition to her longstanding practice performing with woodwinds, she has created compositions for strings, brass, percussion and other instruments, often incorporating electronics and multichannel sound. With an ear toward site-
responsiveness and acoustics, her work has expanded toward installation and non-linear presentations of her music, often staged in hyper-resonant spaces.
Her discography spans over a decade, with eight full-length solo albums and a number of collaborative projects. In 2018 and 2019, she released solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field on NNA Tapes, and has since founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with 2021’s A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release. Recent collaborations include duos with Lawrence English, Olivia Block, and Ben Vida. She has released on a number of labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts.
She has performed both within the US and internationally with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Metropolitan Museum, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, The Art Gallery of New South Wales, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, ReWire Festival, Borderline Festival, and Unsound Festival Krakow. In 2018, she was awarded a Jfund for New Music grant from the American Composers’ Forum and a commission for a brass octet from the Levy Gorvy Gallery in New York. Lea has attended artist residencies at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art, The MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts and ISSUE Project Room. She has received commissions from the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin, and ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia. She is a 2024 recipient of the Gigahertz Production Prize from the ZKM in Karlsruhe.
About Norbert Rodenkirchen
Norbert Rodenkirchen studied flute and Baroque traverso at the music academy Koeln and has been the flute player of the internationally acclaimed ensemble for medieval music Sequentia since 1996. He also works regularly with the French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. With both ensembles and also with his medieval soloprograms “Medieval Echoes” and “Hameln Anno 1284” Norbert Rodenkirchen has been invited to numerous international festivals between New York City (Lincoln Center Festival), Vancouver, London, Melbourne, Paris, Boston and Lviv, a.o.. He is also much in demand as a composer of music for theater and film as well as a producer for CD projects. Additionally he founded the ensemble Candens Lilium which specializes on a dialogue between medieval music and modern avantgarde. Norbert Rodenkirchen has given many workshops on medieval instrumental improvisation and related topics as an unconventional lecturer and coach, f.e. at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Haute Ecole de la Musique in Geneve, the Schola Cantorum in Basel, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and the Wellesley College near Boston.