Cat No. JM37383
Price £70.00
Composer / arranger: Philip Wilby
Category: TEST PIECES (Major Works)

Duration 12.00

Click on "MORE DETAILS" to view the Solo Cornet part.

Previously set as a Championship Testpiece.

Leonardo da Vinci died in 1519, and at his death was the most celebrated artist of his age. Of course, this very artistic reputation was based on a mere handful of surviving works, and many of those are now in a very poor state of repair. However, his current celebrity draws much of its potency from his amazing polymathic interests in all branches of Renaissance knowledge. His researches as an anatomist, as a medical practitioner, or as a military engineer who invented bicycles, diving masks, and machine guns, demonstrate but a few of his non- artistic interests.

A large collection of his sketchbooks are kept in the Queen’s Library at Windsor Castle, and many of his preoccupations are more easily traced from these ephemera than from his more finished works. In particular, his studies of turbulence, of waves and currents, and the rational designs behind apparently chaotic disorder have a special resonance to our current age.

My own composition has taken a sequence of these sketches as a springboard. They translate his visual studies into purely musical terms, and transform their images, turbulentor intimate, mechanistic or heraldic by turns, into a composition which draws its energy from Leonardo’s great example.

Philip Wilby