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 ...