Jocelyn Hagen’s ‘Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci’ makes its London debut

Audiences at London’s Cadogan Hall are about to hear Jocelyn Hagen’s multimedia creation The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, and the composer couldn’t be more thrilled that “this thing that was born in Minnesota is getting international recognition.”

The seven-movement symphony, which premiered in 2019, melds choral and instrumental music with visuals based on Leonardo’s writings and sketches. It’s a work that was inspired by Hagen’s serendipitous visit in 2015 to the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where Leonardo’s Codex Leicester was on exhibit.

“I’d been asked to write something for choir and orchestra, and I’d been wanting to use this brand-new technology [Muséik] that synched film to performance,” Hagen says. “I was looking for a subject matter that had text, with a strong visual component that I could source for projections.

“There is only one other piece about Leonardo da Vinci in the choral catalog,” she says, and with the 500th anniversary of the polymath’s death in 2019, Hagen saw a ripe opportunity to explore him in musical depth.

With the support of major commissioners including the Minnesota Chorale and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, Hagen created a piece that captures the many facets of the great scientist/inventor/artist.

"What Hagen accomplishes through her seven movements is to voice the pent-up side of human nature, that 'unquenchable curiosity' and search for worlds waiting to be born, which characterizes Leonardo's investigations and the rebirth of knowledge on a human scale," William Fietzer wrote of the work on the Classical Post website in 2019.

Hagen herself has had an “unquenchable curiosity” about the power of music since childhood. Born in Minneapolis and raised in North Dakota, she started as a pianist and singer-songwriter; by the time she was a senior in high school, she had written her first piece of choral music.

“I was immediately hooked and knew it was what I wanted to do,” Hagen says. But “how do you create a job of being a composer? That took some time to figure out.”

She earned music degrees from St. Olaf College and the University of Minnesota and did odd jobs before devoting herself to composing full-time about 15 years ago. Along the way, Hagen has been awarded numerous grants and prizes, including from the McKnight Foundation, and has served as composer-in-residence for an impressive array of ensembles and institutions, including the American Composers Forum, the Singers, St. Paul’s Central High School, and several colleges including St. Catherine University and North Dakota State University. With her husband, Twin Cities singer/composer Tim Takach, she created Graphite Publishing for composers to publish vocal music.

Indeed, Hagen’s primary focus has been choral music, which was advantageous when writing the symphony’s vocal parts. “I have a songwriter background, and I really wanted lots of memorable melodies, earworms if you will,” she explains. “The last movement, I was singing it in the house.”

But she also found in Leonardo’s writings and sketches an entry point for instrumental music. Hagen was inspired to make her own musical "automatons" based on all of Leonardo’s inventions — specifically, the wheels and gears reminded her of music.

“There is a moment in the symphony when it’s just the orchestra, about inventions he created,” Hagen says. “The sections of orchestra are their own little machines, little machines that move on screen.

“Every instrument has its own quirks and colors; that’s a big part of learning to become a composer.”

The visual component also came naturally to Hagen, who had worked with choreographers including Penelope Freeh. Their 2014 “dance opera” Test Pilot helped inform her work on Notebooks.

“I’m a very visual person,” Hagen says. “Before starting collaborations with filmmakers, I’d collaborated with choreographers. This work feels like it dances along with the music.

“I grew up when MTV was a big thing, and I loved watching music videos,” she adds. “It was really exciting to dive into that work and create something kind of like that.”

Dave Michel, a bass with the National Lutheran Choir who will travel to perform the work in London, attested to the effectiveness of the “music video” aspect.

“With the technology that Jocelyn employs, every little rubato, every little change in tempo appears to be reflected in what’s being drawn from right to left like Leo did,” he says, “with all the nuances and a mistake that’s crossed out, and a pause that reflects a kind of thinking, the ink splashes.

“The first 30 seconds, when my wife and I saw the premiere, I was completely hooked. You won’t experience a multimedia representation of music like this without this new technology. It is just so integrated.”

Michel, a retired recording engineer, was particularly struck by the notion that the conductor “still gets to do what the conductor wants to do,” and the visuals follow automatically.

That Muséik technology, created in Minneapolis by Ion Concert Media, contributes to the work’s local bona fides. “Notebooks is a completely Minnesota piece of music,” Hagen says. “It premiered here, the software was created here, all of the filmmakers I collaborated with [Isaac Gale, Joseph Midthun and Justin Schell] were based in Minnesota at the time.”

Local musicians, including from Singers in Accord, the South Metro Chorale and the Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra, will also contribute a Midwestern accent to the June 8 event, titled “Sounds of Infinity.”

The concert, which also includes a Mass setting by British composer Philip Stopford, came to fruition when London’s Vox Anima production company came calling. “I thought [Notebooks] would be a wonderful piece that people would want to sing in a really neat hall,” Hagen says. “I thought there would be an audience for it in London.”

And after multiple performances stateside, Hagen is hoping this concert opens the door to more global renown.

“I don’t have a lot of international recognition, so breaking into European market a bit more is exciting,” she says. “I’m not a common name yet, so it would be wonderful to have more works performed and create more connections.

“I hope more places in Europe will do this piece,” she continues. “One of singers who just sang it said, ‘I would love to see it in the city in France [Amboise] where he died.’

“And so would I.”

Event info

What: The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci by Jocelyn Hagen; also Missa Deus Nobiscum by Philip Stopford
When: 6:30 p.m. June 8
Where: Cadogan Hall, London, England
Tickets: £10 to £40 (USD $13.50 to $54)