Lea Bertucci
- Role at the ZKM
- Guest Artist
- Institute / Department
- Hertz-Lab
- At the ZKM
- 2022
- Biography
Lea Bertucci (*1984) is a composer, performer and sound designer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her longstanding practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multichannel speaker arrays, radical methods of free improvisation and creative misuses of audio technology. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-specific and site-responsive sonic interactions of architecture and acoustics. Most notably in her 2018’s »Acoustic Shadows«, a suite of compositions and sound installation that took place as part of the Brückenmusik Festival, inside the hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Cologne, Germany.
Bertucci’s autodidactic and idiosyncratic approach to music is marked by dense masses of sustained dissonance and a fascination with the sonic substance of common experience. She accomplishes this through eccentric methods of field recording and collage. Noise generated through tape manipulation and other creative recording techniques pushes the limits of the recorded medium to elicit visceral physical and emotional experiences. Her compositions dissolve the boundaries between performer and audience by often allowing unfixed listening perspectives in an effort to explore how sound can describe physical space.Bertucci’s discography includes a number of solo and collaborative releases on independent labels and in 2018, she released the critically acclaimed »Metal Aether« on NNA tapes. Bertucci is co-editor of the multi-volume artists book »The Tonebook«, a survey of graphic scores by contemporary composers, published on Inpatient Press.
She has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, 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. Bertucci 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 recently been commissioned by the INA GRM in Paris, Quartetto Maurice in Turin and by ARS Nova Workshop in Philadelphia for new compositions.