"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 based in the Netherlands. Her work often explores various combinations of violin, voice, electronics, film, poetry, and interdisciplinary collaborations.
As a violinist, she has presented solo projects at Rewire Festival, Rewire x Korzo, OT301, Association Philomuses, Center for New Music in San Francisco. 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. 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 enjoys working with composers and has commissioned several new works for solo violin and electronics. She is currently a member of Pi Quartet in The Hague.
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 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).