Central to the new-music experience in New York.
– Time Out NY
Central to the new-music experience in New York.
– Time Out NY

Lea Bertucci & Norbert Rodenkirchen / Chris McIntyre
Wed 15 Apr, 2026, 8pm
22 Boerum Place, Brooklyn 11201
IPR Event Page
ISSUE Project Room celebrates the 20th Anniversary of its Artists-In-Residence (AIR) program throughout 2026 with performances by current residents and returning alumni. This anniversary season highlights AIRs whose work reflects the ongoing evolution of a much broader community of experimental artists who have helped shape ISSUE for over twenty years.
Wednesday, April 15th, at 8pm, ISSUE presents The Days Pass Quickly Immersed in the Shadow of Eternity, a new composition for sampled and live early flutes in 8-channel sound by 2015 AIR Lea Bertucci. 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 the present. Bertucci’s friend and colleague Chris McIntyre (2006 AIR) opens the evening. As recurring collaborators at ISSUE over many years, Bertucci and McIntyre have contributed to the organization’s programs in multiple capacities as both performers and curators.
Steeped in folkloric influences, The Days Pass Quickly is a haunting contemplation of time, duration and memory that evokes the primeval and futuristic simultaneously. It premiered in November 2025 at the ZKM in Karlsruhe Germany and was commissioned for their Gigahertz Prix. Crystalline, minimal and dissonant, pre-recorded sustained pitches and abstracted melodic fragments generated from five of Rodenkirchen’s flutes (Medieval Traverso, Swan Bone, Sheep Bone, Renaissance Tenor and Renaissance Bass) are sampled and deployed across an 8-channel speaker array. Rodenkirchen plays with minimal amplification, in effect expanding and contracting the instrument from its point of live origin to a diffused, spatialized sonic environment. The piece contemplates the depths of human history through the lens of our contemporary upheavals.
Almost exactly 20 years ago, Chris McIntyre presented a multi-channel sound work in ISSUE Project Room’s silo space on the Gowanus Canal. This was opening night of the ensemble Ne(x)tworks’ run as ISSUE’s first Artists-in-Residence. Two decades later, McIntyre returns to summon a fundament of sounds with trombone, voice, synthesizer, and ZOIA box, momentarily suspending and refracting time within the 22 Boerum Pl. theater. He notes: “ISSUE’s residency program afforded me the opportunity to expand my artistic research in a career-altering way. It is still offering me safe haven to try new things, to shine light on new growth in my creative rhizome.”
Metaxis 1 (2006)
Folio score for 2 trumpet, 2 trombone, 2 tuba, bass clarinet, bass sax, 2 perc, elec bass, laptop
Premiered by TILT Brass & Lotet (LoTILT), Dec. 10, 2006 at Roulette
Commissioned by Roulette and Jerome Foundation
Metaxis 2 (2007)
2 trumpet, 2 trombone, 2 tuba & soundtrack*
* recording of live laptop performance by John King
Version 2.0 premiered by TILT SIXtet, May 9, 2007 at Diapason Gallery
Additional Performances:
2.1 - ISSUE Project Room, February 6, 2008
2.2 - Cornelia Street Café, November 10, 2008
2.2 - Ibeam, April 18, 2009
From Metaxis 1 folio score
Performance Note
Metaxis is a collection of notational and strategic material for a large ensemble of creative musicians. Each performance has an element of customization, i.e. an event or ensemble-specific micro-form is developed utilizing the various materials contained within the macro-form of the folio score. Included in the first iteration of the folio (created December '06) are the manuscript micro-form and instructions for laptop and electric bass from the first performance, and several notation pages for winds, brass, and percussion. Future generations of the score will contain additional material developed over the life of the piece. Additional micro-forms will be created by the composer (in collaboration with his own ensembles and by commissioned request), or by individual or group decision-making based on the available collection of material.
Aesthetic Note
The aesthetic of Metaxis is derived from my experiences with performative sound art, free improvisation, and "open score" notation. The technique of inserting predetermined types of material into varying textural/formal contexts is not a new one. On the contrary, it has played a primary role in some of the most probing creative music I know. Of great influence in this regard are Earle Brown's Available Forms, Anthony Braxton's Ghost Trance Music, James Saunders' #[unassigned], and James Tenney's theoretical concept of aural gestalten. My personal approach attempts to address a specific type of interactive and evolutionary music making, whereby the specific grouping of players and instruments gathered, with their individual creative talents, give a unique character to the work despite the fact that the material carries over from performance to performance. A successful execution of this music will (I hope) create a strong feeling of collectivity among the players, and, after multiple performances, affect ensemble memory and sense of temporality.