The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci (Chamber Score) (printed)

Description

SATB div choir and full orchestra. This is the version for chamber orchestra.

The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci must be performed in one of two ways:

• In its entirety with SATB choir, chamber ensemble, chamber orchestra, or full orchestra, and with video projections. Please contact krider@graphitepublishing.com to coordinate projection licensing, instrumental parts, and logistics. Learn more here. 
• As an an SATB a cappella set called “Triptych of Knowledge” from The Notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci including only the movements Practice, Perception, and The Greatest Good in that order. Projections are optional.

If you wish to perform this work in any other way, please contact Jocelyn Hagen directly at jocelyn@jocelynhagen.com for explicit approval.

All performing ensembles are required to sign a brief Letter of Agreement to ensure the production meets minimum requirements. If you have any questions and to initiate this process, please contact krider@graphitepublishing.com.

Duration: 45 minutes

View the perusal score here.

Text:

1. PAINTING AND DRAWING

O Painter!

A painter is not admirable unless he is universal.

A painting is a poem seen but not heard, a poem is a painting heard but not seen. Hence these two poems, or two paintings, have exchanged the senses by which they pierce the intellect.

2. PRACTICE

Those who are in love with practice without knowledge are like the sailor who gets into a ship without rudder or compass and who never can be certain whither he is going. Practice must always be founded on sound theory, and to this, perspective is the guide and the gateway; and without this nothing can be done well in the matter of drawing.

3. RIPPLES

Just as a stone flung into the water becomes the center and cause of many circles, and as sound diffuses itself in circles in the air; so any object, placed in the luminous atmosphere, diffuses itself in circles, and fills the surrounding air with infinite images of itself. And is repeated, the whole everywhere, and the whole in every smallest part.

4. THE GREATEST GOOD

The greatest good of all is knowledge.

Obstacle cannot crush me. Every obstacle yields to firm resolve.

The acquisition of any knowledge is always useful to the intellect, because it will be able to banish useless things and retain those that are good. For nothing can be loved or hated unless it is first known.

5. THE VITRUVIAN MAN
Vitruvius, the architect, says in his work on architecture that the measurements of the human body are distributed by Nature as follows:

four fingers make one palm,
four palms make one foot,
six palms make one cubit;
four cubits make a man’s height.
These measures he used in his building.

If you open your legs so much as to decrease your height one- fourteenth and spread and raise your arms till your middle fingers touch the level of the top of your head you must know that the centre of the outspread limbs will be in the navel and the space between the legs will be an equilateral triangle.

From the roots of the hair to the bottom of the chin is the tenth of a man’s height;
from the bottom of the chin to the top of his head is one eighth of his height;
from the top of the breast to the top of his head will be one sixth of a man.
From the top of the breast to the roots of the hair will be the seventh part of the whole man.
From the nipples to the top of the head will be the fourth part of a man.

The greatest width of the shoulders From the elbow
The whole hand
below the knee

The length of a man’s outspread arms is equal to his height.

The face forms a square in itself.

The distance from the attachment of one ear to the other is equal to that from the meeting of the eyebrows to the chin, and in a fine face the width of the mouth is equal to the length from the parting of the lips to the bottom of the chin.
The ear is exactly as long as the nose. The ear should be as high as from the bottom of the nose to the top of the eyelid. The space between the eyes is equal to the width of an eye.

6. INVENTION (ORCHESTRA ONLY)

7. NATURE

Though human ingenuity may make various inventions, it will never devise inventions more beautiful, nor more simple, nor more to the purpose than Nature does; because in her inventions nothing is wanting, nothing is superfluous.

Necessity is the teacher and tutor of Nature.

8. PERCEPTION

All our knowledge has its origin in our perceptions.

9. LOOK AT THE STARS

O Time! Consumer of all things; O envious age! Thou dost destroy all things and devour all things with the relentless teeth of years, little by little in a slow death.

If you look at the stars, cutting off the rays, you will see those stars so minute that it would seem that nothing could be smaller; it is in fact their great distance that is the reason of their diminution, for many of them are many times larger than the star which is the earth with water.

Now reflect what this, our star, must look like at such a distance, and then consider how many stars might be added — both in longitude and latitude — between those stars that are scattered over the darkened sky.

Look at the Stars. O Time!

Wisdom is the daughter of experience.

-crafted by Jocelyn Hagen using various public domain English translations from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook pages