Wonder in every sense — as an action, an emotion, a perpetual state — is the theme of Ken Burns’s new two-part documentary, Leonardo da Vinci, airing on PBS stations nationwide Nov. 18–19. Over four hours, viewers will hear from scholars, artists, filmmakers, and surgeons about Leonardo’s curiosity, joy, and incredible obsession with the world, all buoyed by original music by composer Caroline Shaw.
Shaw’s score, which is also being released as an album by Nonesuch Records, is intended to be the “connective tissue” between the sparse historical details of Leonardo’s life and his astonishing accomplishments. The documentary on the whole has a light touch, refreshingly free of heaviness.
I spoke with Shaw, as well as directors David McMahon and Sarah Burns, about their collaborative process, which all three said was a novel experience.
Ken Burns is well known for his sweeping cultural and historical documentaries, such as The Civil War and The Central Park Five, but remarkably, Leonardo is his first non-American subject. McMahon and Sarah Burns pointed out that there simply wasn’t a documentary that covered Leonardo’s life from birth to death until now. Because records of the Renaissance polymath are meager, the filmmakers focused in on the staggering amount of technical writing and drawing in Leonardo’s notebooks, allowing the production to chart his life in thought.
“Our films that we’ve made with Ken Burns generally feature subjects set in the 20th-century U.S., and they have lots of archival material around them — footage and photographs,” McMahon explained. With Leonardo, who lived some 500 years ago, “there isn’t any of this, and there are only a handful of likenesses of him that were drawn, maybe by apprentices or people in his life. So we were not going to be able to see him. Instead, it felt like the opportunity was to try to put our audience in between his ears and really understand what he’s thinking.”
From the beginning, the filmmakers understood the need to bring in a composer. “When we get to a point where there isn’t a lot of historical evidence around his life but there’s a notebook page that people have dated to that time and we’re living in that notebook page, it’s the music that keeps us connected,” said Sarah Burns.
Shaw had written soundtracks previously, but the scale of this project — and the directors’ willingness to have her music play a larger role — were new to her. At the same time, Leonardo felt like an old friend. Long before this film, the composer had visited his birthplace during a trip to Italy and discovered she shared an affinity with him after getting her hands on facsimiles of his notebooks.
Shaw said that when she was young, she “would sketch and draw and write, and I’ve moved away from that in my more adult life. But [seeing Leonardo’s notebooks] was a great reminder to remember to be a child, remember to just approach every day [asking], ‘What if it could be like this? I wonder if this could work differently?’” This spirit of curiosity was exactly what the documentary team was looking for.
While incorporating music of the period was an option and would have been in keeping with Ken Burns’s other documentaries, Leonardo — a figure who in his thought still seems so modern — needed something else, the filmmakers realized. Bringing in Shaw — whose style, in her own words, has “three feet in the 17th century and two feet in 1980s pop music and all the things in between” — could bridge the timeless space that Leonardo’s writings open up.
McMahon described Shaw’s music as “modern classical, but it has a timelessness to it, and I think that right away spoke to me about what the music in a film about Leonardo should sound like. He is a man of his times. He’s educated in the bottegas of [Andrea del] Verrocchio in Florence, and he’s learning the same anatomy, physiology, mathematics, and engineering that the other apprentices are. He just is much more curious and imaginative and takes it to places that seem to take him beyond his time.
“When we eventually did secure Caroline and she did start writing and recording demos for us, that’s what she seemed to figure out in her music right away — a kind of joy and ecstasy in his seeking, in his imagination, and in his work.”
Ken Burns and his team follow a somewhat unusual filmmaking process in that they often start with whatever music they will be using and craft a scene around that. This workflow had to be altered for a project that featured freshly composed music. The directors were generous with Shaw in terms of resources and time, as well her commitment to getting things exactly right. McMahon and Sarah Burns both sang the praises of music editor Jennifer Dunnington, who saw the potential in Shaw’s decision to score each individual scene (rather than compose a set of pieces that would then be edited into place).
Shaw had a massive amount of music to write, so she decided early on to work with ensembles that have become something of a home team for her: Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and the contemporary vocal group Roomful of Teeth. While the filmmakers were not initially sure about including vocal music, they were soon convinced, with McMahon describing Roomful of Teeth’s contributions as having “deepened the sense of Leonardo’s humanity.”
He added that Shaw had a fluency with these musicians in the recording studio that was fascinating to watch. Shaw herself described how much she loved being able to say something like “less Schumann, more Handel and Haydn Society” to the members of Attacca Quartet, “and they know exactly what I mean.” The string players would “change the articulation and the feel instantly, which you cannot put in a score,” she explained.
Legendary jazz bassist John Patitucci was brought onto the team by Dunnington and proved to be the perfect wild card. “John was new,” Shaw said, “but John was the absolutely, like, best energy in the room. I love him so much. … He anchored the sound, but he also just anchored the vibe in the studio.”
Attacca Quartet and Roomful of Teeth provided a certain Western classical sound, while the clicking and clacking of Sō Percussion brought a mechanical element into the mix. Shaw’s work is clearly influenced by American composers David Lang and Philip Glass, both of whom also love the period of the European Renaissance. The product here, though Shaw’s own, is reminiscent of the internal propulsion of American minimalism, music that has become synonymous with ingenuity and discovery.
The film is striking in the way it lives in joy and fascination and rarely dwells on conflict or controversy. In the second half, there’s some wonder fatigue — Leonardo’s figuring out the physics of candle flames now? This isn’t to say the directors don’t present moments of strife, difficulty, or moral ambiguity, but those rarely take center stage. When asked about this, Sarah Burns explained that it’s easy to make conflict sensational in the absence of full data, so the filmmakers opted to speculate as little as possible.
Western culture has long obsessed over Leonardo — with particular fervor since the 19th century — and I wondered if this would simply be another episode of genius worship. But the team presents the genius without the worship and made me glad that a life so improbable could be made so tangible.
People who study Leonardo lament his inability to finish so many projects — the publication of his notebooks included — but most viewers will be able to identify with that failing. In one of those emotional moments that this film is able to bring to light, he writes in desperation, “Does anyone finish anything?”
