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Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity is a new 8-channel composition by Lea Bertucci for sampled and live early flutes played by Norbert Rodenkirchen. Olivia Block performs new works on our Historic Estey Pipe Organ.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.
Olivia Block is a composer and performer based in Chicago. For 30 years she has been a pioneering force in the world of experimental music. Her discography is published on Another Timbre, Black Truffle, Erstwhile, Glistening Examples, ina GRM, NNA Tapes, Room40, Sedimental, and Touch, among other labels. She performs live experimental music in festivals and concerts around the world including Rewire, Ina GRM, Sonic Light, and Moog fest.
In concert she performs with synths, piano, voice, organ and amplified objects. Block produces surround sound concerts composed for multiple-speaker arrays. She mixes sonic textures live, diffusing them differently in each performance venue, responding to the acoustics of the space. In addition to her recorded and performed music, Block creates sound/ media installations and scores for large and small ensembles. In her concert, Block will perform songs live, playing organ, piano, singing and mixing live electronics. Her songs touch on themes related to geological time, the birth of mountains and the lives of animals. For this event she will perform on our historic Estey organ and mix in electronic sounds she made using synths from her residency at ina GRM in Paris.
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Event Venue
Epsilon Spires, 190 Main Street,Brattleboro, Vermont, United States
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