"Nomina sunt consequential rerum," sings the featured male alto at the end of Gavin Bryars' Incipit Vita Nova, quoting from Dante. "Names are the consequences of things." This epigrammatic conclusion is not only deceptively simple, but, in this context, cleverly contrary: the piece itself, in fact, is the consequence of a name. Bryars penned the work in 1989 to celebrate the birth of the first child of two close friends. The composer had waited to write the piece until the baby had been named; once the parents decided to call their new daughter Vita, Bryars began looking for a suitable text to set in her honor. He found it in an unlikely place: among the handful of Latin aphorisms scattered among the pages of Italian text in Dante's classic volume La Vita Nuova. Bryars cleverly collects and recycles Dante's Latin snippets (and adds one from Renaissance philosopher Pico della Mirandola's Conclusiones), stringing them into a sometimes disjunct—but, when considered together, surprisingly poignant—piece of poetic collage. This he sets with pensive and harmonically engaging music and unadorned melody that render each borrowed phrase of text with a tightly focused sense of expression.

The work is scored for a countertenor, originally David James of the Hilliard Ensemble, and a string trio. Bryars explains that the baby's father had expressed his fondness for the composer's string quartets, while the mother was enchanted by James' crystalline voice. There is thus a strong sense of anachronism about this piece: a Medieval Latin text, sung in the smooth tone of an early music vocalist, against harmonies from a string trio that shift variously from austere minimalist drone to evocative Monteverdian chromaticism. Although the strings serve a clearly subsidiary role to the countertenor's declamation, Bryars initially introduces the voice in such a way that it emerges seamlessly from the sonority of the strings; likewise, after the text has been completed, the singer blends once again into the sustained accompanimental harmonies. This careful manipulation of texture seeks to evoke the permeability between the spiritual and material realms, which the birth of baby Vita represents and which the assembled texts of Dante and Mirandola seem to suggest: "A new life is beginning...All life is immortal."

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