Lea Bertucci’s New Album Traces Music Back to Its Ancestral Origins

Lea Bertucci’s latest album borrows its title from a monk’s meditation on spiritual life. The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity comes from Father Michael Holleran, a phrase that set the tone for a record preoccupied with human creativity at its most elemental.

In an email interview with A Closer Listen, Bertucci detailed how the project connects her background in experimental music and multitracked woodwinds with a growing fascination for medieval sound. The piece was written for flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen, a member of the ensemble Sequentia. She first saw him perform in New York on a swan bone flute years ago, an experience that lodged itself. Remote collaborations during the pandemic gave the idea forward momentum.

The album thinks through what Bertucci calls “the deep and ancient tradition of human musicking.” She returns to a speculative moment when someone first turned a bone into an instrument and played it inside a cave. That act, driven by something beyond basic survival, left no recordings but shaped everything that followed. The music on Days does not try to reconstruct a specific historical sound. Instead, it layers long tones and spatial