Lea Bertucci With Norbert Rodenkirchen and Olivia Block

MIT List Visual Art Center and Non-Event are pleased to showcase a special concert of multichannel works by Lea Bertucci with master Medieval flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen and a solo performance by composer Olivia Block.

Lea Bertucci and Norbert Rodenkirchen will perform The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, a new work for multichannel speakers, electronics and live early flutes. This work reaches back through the spans of history and catapults ancient music into an immersive present. A haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that explores the phenomena of human hearing and evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously, in these waning days of the Anthropocene.

Olivia Block will perform a multichannel version of Breach, a composition that combines electronics and field recordings made in various locations within the Laguna San Ignacio (San Ignacio lagoon) in Baja, Mexico. Breach places the listener in the lagoon from multiple points of view: underwater, on the shore, and inside of imaginary seascapes.

The combination of field recordings and textures creates a subjective, often surreal aural space rather than an objective representation of a location.

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. She has released on a number of labels including Astral Spirits, Room40, American Dreams and Dinzu Artefacts. 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, Carlos Giffoni and Ben Vida, among others.

Norbert Rodenkirchen is a composer and creative flute player who feels at home both in medieval and contemporary music. His music builds a bridge between early music and modern day avantgarde. He studied flute with Hans Martin Mueller and Günther Hoeller at the Staatliche Musikhochschule Koeln has been the flute player of Sequentia since 1996 and also works regularly with the French ensemble Dialogos directed by Katarina Livljanic. He is also much in demand as a composer of music for theater and film as well as a producer for CD projects, most of them in coproduction with the WDR/ West German Radio. Furthermore he directs the ensemble Candens Lilium, specialized on a sounding dialogue between medieval times and today.

Olivia Block is a media artist and composer, who is based in Chicago. 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.

Presenters: non-Event, the Goethe-Institut Boston, MIT Music & Theater Arts Section

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