Dante's early book La Vita Nuova (1293) is an autobiographical account of his relationship with the beloved Beatrice. The evolution of his love is explored figuratively though lyric verses and explicitly through prosaic explanatory texts surrounding each poem. Such a dynamic creates a startling effect when one encounters the only unfinished poem of the book. Grief stricken from Beatrice's death, Dante was unable to complete a canzone describing all the wonderful things she had done for him as a person. What makes this moment remarkable is not the poem itself or its undeveloped state. Rather, the prose immediately following it speaks clearly to Dante's disheveled state of mind. He begins with a striking sentence in Latin, which stands in stark contrast to the rest of the book's vernacular Italian. He then lapses into a lengthy discussion of numerology as it applied to his beloved, specifically, the many ways in which the number 9 was her friend. Such a discussion seemed to me like a way for Dante to distract himself from what he was experiencing. This, in turn, had the effect of turning the good intentions of the poem into a supremely tragic gesture. It was this instability of purpose and mind that I wanted to explore in Quomodo Sedet Sola, whose title comes from the line in Latin. Typically when setting a text, the goal is to bring it to life in some way. Here, however, I felt that the life of the poem came more from Dante's mindset and the circumstances surrounding its progeny and incompletion rather than anything the poem itself had to say. Thus, the vocal part exists almost as an accessory to the strings, which at times become quite detached from the voice, and are responsible for carrying much of the music's dramatic weight. The number 9 pervades the entire piece, governing all aspects from meter and harmony to form and instrumentation. The work was commissioned by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn and was written for them and the mezzo-soprano Hilary Walker. It was premiered on March 1, 2008 by the dedicatees at St. Ann and the Holy Trinity Church in Brooklyn, New York.