Gavin Bryars

Incipit Vita Nova

Incipit Vita Nova (A new life is beginning) was written for male alto and string trio and sets those short phrases that appear in Latin rather than Italian in Dante's La Vita Nuova (New Life). It was composed in February 1989 to celebrate the birth of Vita, the first child of my friends Erica and Robert Hewison. I had decided to write the piece long before the birth but did not start until I knew whether the baby was a boy or a girl, and the baby's name (Vita). At first I looked for all uses of the word Vita (life) among Pico della Mirandola's Conclusiones (having already set Pico for Glorious HiIl, my first piece for the Hilliard Ensemble in 1988) and eventually added one of these sentences (Omnis vita est immortalis) as the penultimate line of the text, while working on La Vita Nuova as the main source. The first performance was given by David James at St. Mary de Castro Church in Leicester on 1 April 1989, and shortly afterwards was performed with the first performances of Cadman Requiem in Lyon and Marseilles.Gavin Bryars