This November 2019, True Concord is thrilled to present the Arizona premiere of Jocelyn Hagen’s The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, for choir, orchestra, and video projections.

Inspired by words, drawings and ideas in Leonardo da Vinci’s personal notebooks, rising star and American composer Jocelyn Hagen explores the mind and world of da Vinci. The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci features a video projection over the choir and orchestra showing the actual drawings of one of the greatest minds of all time, in motion, synced in real time with the live performance.

About the work, Hagen writes:

In the summer of 2016 I attended an exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts featuring da Vinci’s Codex Leicester. Seeing these pages with my own eyes cemented my devotion to developing this project. The liquidity of his mind and the way he connects disparate ideas as a means of understanding them is genuinely inspiring. And da Vinci was known as much for his failures as his successes. That’s inspiring as well. He wasn’t afraid to take ideas out of context or take risks.

Because da Vinci’s intricate handwriting and sketches are stunningly beautiful, it would be odd not to include them as a visual component to this project. Because he was left-handed, his words and letters, written in vernacular Italian, are reversed. (This technique kept his sleeve out of the wet ink.) I imagine these beautifully scribed words scrolling above the musicians and adding a wonderful texture to the performance. Many sketches in the notebooks are of the human form, and will correspond perfectly to his observations on the proportions of the body.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci will be the first large-scale choral work to incorporate the revolutionary technology of MUSÈIK, an advanced digital software platform that allows the video to sync in real time with the live musicians rather than vice versa. Audiences will see da Vinci’s drawings and writings come to life in connection with the music on stage resulting in a fully-immersive and dynamic experience.

Performances:

November 22, 7:00 PM – Sahuarita USD Auditorium

November 23, 7:30 PM – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church

November 24, 3:00 PM – St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church