The Orpheus Choir of Toronto is ending their 2023/24 season with The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci by American composer Jocelyn Hagen. The unique multimedia work uses cutting edge tech to bring the centuries old thoughts and drawings of the Italian polymath to vivid life.
Orchestras and other ensembles often play to projected video or even blockbuster movies. The MUSÈIK digital syncing software, however, allows for fluid timing. The advanced technology allows the video elements to be created as the music is performed, i.e. to slow down or speed up along with the musicians themselves, an important innovation.
The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci is scored for SATB choir along with electronics and orchestra, using video synchronizing technology to bring the notebooks of the inventor and artist, with their drawings and words, to vivid life.
Jocelyn Hagen’s The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci
What’s in the notebooks? Da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, inventor, musician, engineer and architect. The notebooks contain his drawings and also his collected thoughts in the form of notes, from about the mid-1480s. His writing often appears as what is known as 16th century mirror writing, which is read in reverse, and from right to left. It’s likely that he wrote on loose sheets of paper that he kept with him for that purpose, and then later collected them into notebooks.
“Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, it will never devise any inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, and nothing is superfluous.” — Leonardo da Vinci
From the premiere in Minnesota in 2019:
After viewing an exhibition of Da Vinci’s notebooks in Minneapolis in 2016, composer Jocelyn Hagen began to develop the work she had been thinking about for years in earnest. She was fascinated by the way the notebooks documented Da Vinci’s thought processes, and the way he could connect various ideas and concepts.
The work was commissioned by a consortium of ensembles from across the United States, and since its premiere in 2019, has been performed dozens of times.
Since 2023, the work has been available to ensembles outside the consortium of commissioning organizations. This will represent its Canadian premiere.
Along with Jocelyn Hagen’s piece, the program will be rounded out by short works of the Italian Renaissance.
- Find tickets, and more details about the May 11 Canadian premiere of The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci, [HERE].
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