Lea Bertucci and Norbert Rodenkirchen Reanimate Early Music

Lea Bertucci’s new album The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity arrives as a collaboration with flutist Norbert Rodenkirchen, a specialist in medieval traditions known for his work in the ensemble Sequentia. Released on her Cibachrome Editions, the record collapses a span of millennia, folding pre-standardization wind instruments into a digital architecture of layered samples and psychoacoustic detours.

Bertucci spent two years on the project while earning a Master’s degree at Wesleyan University. She built a timeline-driven score from 60 recordings of Rodenkirchen playing ten different instruments from his personal collection. Among them is a replica of the Geißenklösterle swan bone flute, an artifact dated between 43,000 and 39,000 BCE and widely considered the oldest surviving musical instrument. Because early medieval performance practices left no written notation, Rodenkirchen’s work already requires a mixture of research and creative speculation, a gap that lined up with Bertucci’s own interest in letting imagination fill historical blanks.

The composition sets ornate trills, massed tones, and aerated harmonies into shifting peaks and valleys. Rodenkirchen moves through a hall of mirrors constructed from his own playing, while Bertucci’s Ableton processing turns reed and bone sounds into something that flirts with tripped-out, spatialized texture. In live performances the sounds are further spatialized, moving through the space in ways that reframe early music as a contemporary, almost sculptural event.