Rhea – Waterworks 2023: Festival of Experimental Sound

Rhea (violin, vocals), "The Ego Death of Adam Smith," performed live at the Waterworks 2023 festival in Boston, Massachusetts, April 28, 2023

Rhea Burdick is a composer, violinist, and violin maker based in Boston. Originally from Northern Virginia she began playing violin and fiddle at the age of 5. Fascinated by figuring out how things work, she began to try to create music. This led her to pursue classical composition at New England Conservatory. During this time, she simultaneously played fiddle in an old-time folk band called “Sasquatch and the Jackalope,” with her friend and banjo player Aisling Carroll. Reticent at first to combine the worlds of classical and folk music, she began answering this question immediately following school. She self-produced 5 albums of experimental folk music ranging from found sound collages to recompositions of traditional tunes with all manner of compositional innovation and improvisations. Heavily influenced by free improvisation, her most recent work explores the improvisatory elements of folk music to their greatest extremes, without sacrificing the inherent folkiness of the source material.

Video: Wenhua Shi and Nick Stevens
Video Editing: Wenhua Shi
Audio recording: Lucas Bickford and Matthew Azevedo
Mix: Matthew Azevedo

Presented by Non-Event and the Metropolitan Waterworks Museum