“The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity” Lea Bertucci with Norbert Rodenkirchen.

Event details:

• Opening set: Olivia Block — "Breach"
• Date: Sunday, April 19, 2026
• Time: 6:30pm
• Location: Basilica Hudson, North Hall
• Program: "The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity" — Lea Bertucci with Norbert Rodenkirchen
• Format: Archaic flutes in 8-channel audio

Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is a new composition for sampled and live early flutes in 8-channel sound by Lea Bertucci. Steeped in folkloric influences, this work is a haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously.

Written for master flutist, early music scholar, and member of the legendary early music group Sequentia, Norbert Rodenkirchen, this work reaches back through the spans of history and catapults ancient music into an immersive present.

The collection of flutes that Norbert has amassed over many decades features unique instruments not usually found in the repertoire of most flutists, which spans from the Renaissance to Medieval to Neolithic. Pre-recorded sustained pitches and abstracted melodic fragments generated from five of Norbert’s flutes (Medieval Traverso, Swan Bone, Sheep Bone, Renaissance Tenor, and Renaissance Bass) are sampled and live deployed across an eight-channel speaker array. Cutting edge audio technology in symbiosis with the deep history of music creates pathways for a new kind of listening.

Norbert Rodenkirchen performs live fragments of ancient songs and improvisations related to the origin of the flutes. Sustained tones and an idiosyncratic isopolyphony are two major aesthetic features of the work. The drones pulsing through the sound system create a lush and dissonant bed over which Norbert plays with minimal amplification, in effect expanding and contracting the instrument from its point of live origin to a diffused, spatialized sonic environment. This piece contemplates the depths of human history through the lens of our contemporary upheavals.

The project premiered November 20th, 2025 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, DE and is the recipient of the 2023 Gigahertz Prix.

About the artists:

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 labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts.

She has performed in 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.

Norbert Rodenkirchen studied flute and Baroque traverso at the music academy Koeln and has been the flute player of the ensemble Sequentia since 1996. He also works regularly with the French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. With both ensembles and in his medieval solo programs “Medieval Echoes” and “Hameln Anno 1284,” Norbert Rodenkirchen has been invited to numerous international festivals including Lincoln Center Festival (New York City), Vancouver, London, Melbourne, Paris, Boston and Lviv. He composes music for theater and film and produces CD projects. He also founded the ensemble Candens Lilium, which specializes in dialogue between medieval music and modern avant-garde. Norbert has given many workshops on medieval instrumental improvisation and related topics at institutions such as the Mozarteum in Salzburg, the Haute Ecole de la Musique in Geneve, the Schola Cantorum in Basel, the University of Oregon in Eugene, and Wellesley College.

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer. Her discography, spanning nearly thirty years, is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Ina GRM, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music on electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects, and creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. Her recent live performances are long experimental songs for voice, piano, and electronics. She composes for chamber ensemble, orchestra and pipe organ.

Block has performed, premiered and exhibited throughout Europe, America, and Japan in festivals and series including Rewire, MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal, Sonic Light, Red Bull Academy, Kontraste, Archipel and others. Her installations have been shown at The Nasher Sculpture Museum, The Richard H. Driehaus Museum, Arthur Ross Gallery at University of Pennsylvania, CEAM at Flagler University, MCA Chicago, Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech, Museo Reina Sofia, The Smart Museum at University of Chicago, Manhattan Museum of Arts and Design, Sokolowsko Sanitorium (Poland), CONTEXT (Miami and NY) and The Jay Pritzker Pavilion in Millennium Park (Chicago). She has taught at The School of the Art Institute (Sound Department) and Northwestern University (Sound Arts and Industries program), and has completed many university teaching residencies and workshops worldwide.