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Doors 8pm / Show 8:30pm
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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.

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 on a dialogue between medieval music and modern avantgarde. 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.