"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. Her artistic output spans a variety of forms including electroacoustic and live acoustic composition, compositions for her own performance, and concerts of varied musical, filmic, poetic, and artistic work. Common themes explored in her work include anachronisms, language, as well as theatrical settings in musical performance.
As a violinist, she has presented solo projects at Rewire Festival, Rewire x Korzo, OT301 (Amsterdam), Association Philomuses (Paris), Studio Loos (The Hague), Auditorium Clarisse (Italy), Center for New Music (San Francisco), Muse Performance Space, and ATLAS Black Box. 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 (Arnhem, NL), Project Audire (Portugal), and Interference Series (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.
Her works have been performed at festivals and venues such as Grachtenfestival, Nieuwe Noten (Amsterdam), 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 (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.
She has given lecture-performances at Orpheus Institute (Gent, BE), University of Virgina, University of Colorado Boulder, and Institute of Sonology. She holds a Doctorate of Musical Arts from University of Colorado Boulder, and her mentors include Carolyn Stuart, Lina Bahn, Harumi Rhodes, and Monica Germino. 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).