Vivian Fine

Composer, born in Chicago, Illinois, USA. After studies with teachers including Cowell, Sessions, and Szell, she taught at Bennington (1964–87) and other schools. She was a prolific composer of Modernist works with a broad, expressive range.

Vivian Fine (28 September 1913 in Chicago, IL - 20 March 2000 in Bennington, VT)

Over her 70 year career, Vivian Fine became one of America’s most important composers. In addition to numerous articles and several dissertations, two books have been published on Fine’s life and music: The Music of Vivian Fine, by the noted musicologist Heidi Von Gunden (Scarecrow Press, 1999), which won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor award in 2000, and Vivian Fine, A Bio-Bibliography, by the poet and composer Judith Cody (Greenwood Press, 2002). Her complete musical archives may be found on her website at vivianfine.org,

Vivian Fine was born in Chicago. Fine composed her first piece at thirteen while studying harmony with Ruth Crawford, who considered Fine her protegée. Through Madame Herz and Crawford, Fine met Henry Cowell, Imre Weisshaus, and Dane Rudhyar, who became strong supporters of her talent.

Fine made her professional debut as a composer at age sixteen with performances in Chicago, New York (Solo for Oboe, at a Pan-American Association of Composers’ concert) and Dessau (Four Pieces for Two Flutes, at an International Society of Contemporary composers’ concert). In 1931, the 18-year-old Fine moved to New York to further her studies. In addition to her career as a composer, Fine continued to perform.

Fine’s early compositional style was highly dissonant and contrapuntal. Henry Brant noted that “No two Fine pieces are alike either in subject matter or instrumentation; each new work appears to generate its own style appropriate to the subject, and there are no mannerisms which persist from work to work.”

Notable in Fine’s work is a sense of fun, either as a major element in the piece (The Race of Life, Memoirs of Uliana Rooney) or as a humorous section or reference inserted into a more serious piece (The Women in the Garden, Songs and Arias).

Fine wrote extensively for voice, employing the poetry of Shakespeare, Racine, Dryden, Keats, Whitman, Dickinson, Kafka, Neruda, and others in a wide variety of settings. She composed two chamber operas, The Women in the Garden (1978) and Memoirs of Uliana Rooney (1994). In The Women in the Garden, Fine used the writings of Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan and Gertrude Stein to fashion conversations among the four women and a tenor representing the various men in their lives.

Among Fine’s many awards were a Guggenheim Fellowship, grants from the Ford, Rockefeller, Ditson, Woolley, Koussevitsky, Readers’ Digest and Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge foundations, several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Dollard andYaddo Awards. For many years, Fine was a beloved member of the faculty of Bennington College in Vermont. Fine died in March of 2000 at the age of 86, following an automobile accident.

Fine's manuscripts are housed at the Library of Congress.