Lea Bertucci & Norbert Rodenkirchen

ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.

Wednesday, April 15th, at 8pm, ISSUE presents The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, a new composition for sampled and live early flutes in 8-channel sound by 2015 AIR Lea Bertucci. 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 the present. Bertucci’s friend and colleague Chris McIntyre (2006 AIR) opens the evening. As recurring collaborators at ISSUE over many years, Bertucci and McIntyre have contributed to the organization’s programs in multiple capacities as both performers and curators.

Steeped in folkloric influences, The Days Pass Quickly is a haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously. It premiered in November 2025 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany and was commissioned for their Gigahertz Prix. Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, pre-recorded sustained pitches and abstracted melodic fragments generated from five of Rodenkirchen’s flutes (Medieval Traverso, Swan Bone, Sheep Bone, Renaissance Tenor and Renaissance Bass) are sampled and deployed across an 8-channel speaker array. Rodenkirchen plays with minimal amplification, in effect expanding and contracting the instrument from its point of live origin to a diffused, spatialized sonic environment. The piece contemplates the depths of human history through the lens of our contemporary upheavals.

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 in a dialogue between medieval music and modern avant garde. 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.