"Bowing and scraping, she concentrates on bright, glassy harmonics that reverberate across the space, not so much playing as unleashing them, the same way a fierce wind uproots dust and sends it aloft in clouds and twisters." – Philip Sherburne (Futurism Restated)
Leslee Smucker is a violinist, composer-improviser and interdisciplinary maker based in the Netherlands. Through her practice she often utilizes various constellations of mediums, including sound, composition, improvisation, installation, metalwork, animation, technology, poetry, essays, film, and lectures. Her work is often concerned with searching and process: something “on a threshold,” a transitional space, or the space between.
As a violinist, she creates solo projects that often bring together poetry, film, electronics, scenes and voice. These projects have been presented at venues and festivals including Center for New Music in San Francisco, Rewire Festival, Rewire x Korzo, and Association Philomuses. In 2023, she performed Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura for violin and 8-channel electronics with Veniero Rizzardi at the Composing Spaces Festival, and in 2025 has recorded the work. Other solo performances include The Scottish Library (presented by the University of Edinburgh’s Cantos Project), the Andriessen Festival, Project Audire, and Interference Series in Flagstaff, AZ.
Her works have been performed at festivals and venues such as Grachtenfestival, Nieuwe Noten, Gaudeamus Muziekweek, and November Music. She is active in multichannel composition, with works including Black 10 for Wavefield Synthesis, premiered at the WFS Festival in The Hague and later adapted for an 8-channel version at the Autumn Festival in Projection Room, Brussels. For Rewire Festival 2023, she was commissioned to create worlds within, a concert designed for sensory-sensitive audiences. Her album Breathing Landscape (Beacon Sound, 2024) was included in Bandcamp’s “Best Experimental Music of February 2024.” As a guest composer at EMS Stockholm, she worked with their Serge and Buchla systems. In 2025, she was awarded a grant from Stimuleringsfonds to create her project entitled D//Am0re, a hybrid electronic resonating viola d’amore.
She often collaborates with other musicians in different settings including improvising and chamber music. She performs as half of "Murmuration Duo" (violin/viola d'amore) with Siamak Anvari (loudspeakers) including performances at AUDIOMANZA Festival in Padova, Italy. She was a Barnes Fellow in Philadelphia with JACK Quartet, a fellow at Ensemble Evolution 2021 with the International Contemporary Ensemble, and the Artistic Director of the chamber ensemble Green Room Artists. She performs frequently with Modelo62, Kali Ensemble, and is a member of Pi Quartet.
She has presented her artistic research at Institute of Sonology, Orpheus Institute, University of Virginia, the T.S. Eliot Conference, and University of Padova. She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from University of Colorado Boulder. She has essays published in The Edinburgh Companion to Ezra Pound and the Arts, and a co-author essay with Carlo Caballero in Fauré Studies (Cambridge University Press).
