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

Opening set by Olivia Block

Sunday, April 19, 2026

6:30pm

Basilica Hudson, North Hall

“The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity” Lea Bertucci with Norbert Rodenkirchen.
Archaic flutes in 8-channel audio.

Opening set by Olivia Block “Breach”

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.

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. 

Norbert Rodenkirchen, who studied flute and Baroque traverso at the music academy Koeln, has been the flute player of the internationally acclaimed ensemble for medieval music Sequentia since 1996 and 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. 

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, where at any given concert she might be playing electronic instruments, piano, organ or amplified objects. Block also creates surround sound concerts, sound installations and scores. Her most 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 her work throughout Europe, America, and Japan in tours in festivals and performance series including Rewire,  MoogFest, Festival del Bosque Germinal, Sonic Light, Redbull Academy, Kontraste, Archipel and many 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 in the Sound Department and at Northwestern University in the Sound Arts and Industries program. She has completed many university teaching residencies and teaches workshops around the world.