Lea Bertucci is an artist, composer, and performer 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 2018’s Acoustic Shadows, a suite of compositions and sound installation that took place as part of the Bruckenmusik Festival, inside the hollow body of the Deutzer bridge in Koln, Germany.
With a discography that spans over a decade, Lea has released eight albums of full-length solo works and a number of collaborative projects, notably a full length album and EP with vocalist Amirtha Kidambi on Astral Spirits Records. A new project with Ben Vida for woodwinds, electronics, voice and tape, will be forthcoming in 2022. In 2018 and 2019, her critically acclaimed solo albums Metal Aether and Resonant Field were released on NNA Tapes. In 2021, she founded her own label, Cibachrome Editions, with A Visible Length of Light as the inaugural release.
Lea is co-editor of The Tonebook, a survey of graphic scores by contemporary composers, published on Inpatient Press in 2018. As a sound designer, Lea has collaborated with dance and theater artists including Big Dance Theater, Pig Iron Theater, and Mallory Catlett. As a music technologist and sampling enthusiast, she has created bespoke sample libraries for Slate + Ash and Spitfire Audio.
She has performed extensively across the US and Europe with presenters such as The Museum of Modern Art New York, Blank Forms, Gagosian Gallery, Pioneer Works, The Kitchen, The Walker Museum, Tempo Reale in Florence, Muziekgebouw Amsterdam, Museo Reina Sofia Madrid, Sound of Stockholm Festival, 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. Lea 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 that are forthcoming in 2021/22.
