Minnesota composer Jocelyn Hagen was working on her first opera seven years ago when a friend turned her onto new concert software that more seamlessly syncs video projections to live music.
This weekend, Tucson will get to experience the first-ever large-scale choral work to incorporate that technology, called Musèik — billed as the world’s most advanced digital sync software.
“The classical concert world understands that video is a big draw and there’s this really special thing about syncing live music with video,” Hagen explained from a concert stop in Michigan on a snowy day last week. “It’s really powerful.”
True Concord Voices & Orchestra will perform the Arizona premiere of Hagen’s choral symphony “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci,” which had its world premiere in Hagen’s native Minneapolis last March.
Muséik was created by Minneapolis-based Ion Concert Media, a multimedia company that combined digital synchronization technology with an online library of pre-licensed rentable digital show content.
“I was really excited about this technology and I had been approached by the (Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra and Minnesota Chorale about commissioning a large-scale piece for them” in 2016, she said.
Fresh off the success of her multimedia dance opera “Test Pilot” that featured choreography and video projections, Hagen wanted to combine video in her choral commission.
She was inspired to focus on da Vinci after seeing an exhibit in summer 2016 of the Renaissance artist’s “Codex Leicester,” a collection of scientific writings by Leonardo da Vinci that lends insight into the mind of the man whose curiosities ran the gamut of literature to science, anatomy, architecture and engineering.
“Notebooks” commemorates the 500th anniversary of da Vinci’s death.
“I knew he was very prolific in the things that he had created and the vast reaches of his curiosity,” Hagen said, adding that seeing his notes in his handwriting brings a certain reality to the mythic stature history has assigned da Vinci.
“People are endlessly fascinated by da Vinci and his works,” she said.
Hagen incorporates images of da Vinci’s writings and art throughout the 35-minute piece. But the focus is on her music, unlike contemporary cine concerts where the film’s narrative drives the music.
“It’s more about the music. The music is meeting the film on equal ground. It’s not the other way around,” she said. “I created the music first and I also helped design the visual components in the video.”
Through seven movements, Hagen searches for the curiosity that drove da Vinci and drives human nature as a whole.
“What I wanted for people to walk away with is just to be in awe of creating and what we are capable of as human beings,” she said. “I think I needed this as a creative person. I needed to celebrate what we can do when we have good intent and we are creating things that are beautiful. That’s what I wanted people to experience, this amazing feeling of the beauty of life.”
Hagen will be in the audience when True Concord performs “The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci” three times this weekend.
Her husband, fellow composer Timothy Takach, will be in the choir, where he has sung for several years.
