UCLA

La Vita Nuova is a new orchestral work written over the course of the 2023-24 school year. Standing at about nine minutes in length, it is the most substantial work I have written for orchestra, and is also my most drafted work with 9 complete drafts. The purpose of my thesis was not just to write an orchestral piece, but to amend the problem of leaving works less-than-perfect. I have found that the process of drafting my music is an incredibly necessary one, and went in three stages: writing, proportions, and details. The writing process was the fastest, which flew by in only a couple of weeks. My main goal was to let the entire work sprout from one single idea, a characteristic of some of the best musical works that we know in the 21st century. My very first draft did not do this at all, and it was only after studying Stravinsky’s Variations for Orchestra that I realized it was simply not good enough. Therefore, I kept the sections that I felt strongly about, and re-wrote the rest in a matter of days. While expanding on a single musical motive was a difficult feat for me, I finally let myself expand upon one idea, rather than bouncing to multiple different ones. The proportion stage was much more difficult. I felt that my introduction and coda were not the right lengths and, through the study of other scores (Beethoven Symphony no. 2 specifically), I found that the most successful ratio of the introduction to the rest of the work is about 1 to 14. The coda can be proportional to the introduction or slightly longer, depending on how long the listeners need to feel stability after the body of the work, and thus, applied this idea to my own music. I additionally wanted to incorporate the golden mean ratio, and managed to fit that into the proportions of the work by including one moment of much-needed musical rest, creating a small golden section. Through the use of rough arc diagrams of my own work, I also concluded there was a large segment of new material which needed to be replaced by the development of earlier material. This, I believe, was what made the biggest difference in the entire work, and was an epiphany only reached because of the number of times I drafted the piece. The details stage was where the work became much more refined, and took it from being a student piece to a true, professional work. This included articulation changes, refinement in orchestration, dynamic considerations, and the like, which will help the piece speak the way it should when it is premiered in Siena, Italy in June of 2024.