Leonhard Bartussek was born in a small village in Austria, into a musical family. Very early, at the age of fifteen, he was drawn out into the wide world - to constantly expand his human and social perspectives and his musical horizons.
He considers it a great gift to have been able to gather this wealth of experience, but at the same time it demanded of the artist a great willingness to take risks and a great deal of patience. He has accumulated a multitude of musical experiences embedded in extremely diverse social, as well as structurally organizational contexts: from living and working in a kind of tango-punk cooperative in Buenos Aires (2006 to 2008), to touring life as a baroque cellist in leading European baroque ensembles, to earning a Masters Degree at the renowned Juilliard School in New York City (2010 to 2012), to solo, concentrated, compositional and artistic work in his Düsseldorf studio.
In addition to experiencing a variety of different art forms and cultural approaches on different continents, he has been shaped above all by the experience of always being part of a larger whole. In his experience, the framework and the hierarchical or, in some cases, horizontal structure of collaboration has an enormously strong influence on the degree to which one succeeds in developing individually and collectively. From these experiences he develops his current efforts to set up his work and his projects radically democratically and collectively, in order to develop the highest possible degree of identification and intrinsic motivation of all individual musicians and all participants (including the audience). The key to this is the squaring of the circle, namely the attempt to enable an organically permeable hierarchy where it seems appropriate from an artistic point of view, and at the same time to radically decouple the economic power that normally accompanies being at the top of such a hierarchy from it and to subject it to a collective evaluation; at least the economic distribution question is solved radically democratically and serves as a corrective for possible abuse of power. If we look into the history of mankind, the solution of the power question (the core idea of democracy in general) is the most urgent task to solve our global problems.
Leonhard Bartussek is working on a collective book project that addresses this very issue.
Furthermore, it should be mentioned that Leonhard Bartussek is also active at the interface with the visual arts. He develops reworked photos, videos, light, object and sound installations, which in some cases merge with his music to form immersive performances and/or stand on their own as autonomous works of art.