Interview with Composer
Vivian Fine
by Elizabeth Vercoe
International League of Women Composers
Journal, June, 1992, pp. 18-23.
Courtesy of the International Alliance for
Women in Music.
[Born in Chicago on September 28, 1913,
Vivian Fine has been writing music for sixty-five
years. She has recently retired from her long
teaching career at Bennington College to
concentrate on her work, and lives with her
husband, sculptor Benjamin Karp, in Hoosick
Falls, New York.
This interview on April 8, 1992 was
conducted at the Brockway family home in
Bennington, Vermont before the premiere at
Bennington College of a new work by Fine called
Hymns, the second part of which, “Toward a
Distant Shore,” was dedicated to the memory
of her friend, Jean Brockway. We were there at
the invitation of Professor Brockway and his
daughter Joan Brockway Esch, a Boston cellist and
teacher. It seemed fitting that a beautiful
seascape by Carl Ruggles, painter and composer,
kept an eye on the proceedings.]
Q. Of course, you have been at Bennington
College for years so that has been a very stable
situation for you.
A. I taught there for twenty-three wonderful
years, but I resigned in 1987. I just wanted to
have all my time for composing and my own life,
but I still have close ties to Bennington, and it
is a quite wonderful place, a community.
Q. I have read that you started writing very
young and that your first teacher was Ruth
Crawford, and it interested me also that you felt
she had been an ongoing influence in your life. I
wondered if you could say something about what
she was like as a teacher and whether you knew
her music at the time you were studying with
her.
A. How I got to study with Ruth was this way.
I had begun to study when I was eleven years old
with a very interesting woman called Diane
Lavoie-Herz who had worked with Scriabin in
Europe. And Ruth had also studied with Madame
Herz, as we called her. When I had studied with
her for about a year, Mme. Herz thought, quite
wisely, that I ought to have some education in
theory and harmony although there wasn’t
any thought of me being a composer because I
hadn’t manifested any such interest. (l had
been playing the piano since I was five.) We were
very poor, so Mme. Herz made an arrangement that
she would teach Ruth piano and Ruth would teach
me harmony and theory, I began with her when I
was twelve. When I had studied for about six
months, she asked me to write a [piano] piece,
and it wasn’t a bad little piece. It had
something individual about it. I remember Ruth
standing in the back of the room, and when I
turned around after I played it, there was a very
intent look on her face. She had really listened.
And I think the only thing she said was,
“Write another one.” And that was the
beginning of my being a composer. Then I began to
write, and Ruth became very interested in what I
was doing. She would play works that she had just
completed. I would say that began when I was no
more than fifteen. That continued until I was
seventeen. I became totally absorbed in
composition, an absolute obsession with me, a
happy, happy obsession.
I didn’t like the public high school I
was going to [in Chicago]. It was a badly run
school with fifty students in a class, a terrible
school. I told my mother I didn’t want to
go to school anymore, I think I was fourteen. My
parents were an immigrant Russian Jewish family
and [believed] education wasn’t tied to an
institution, education was tied to books and
going to lectures and thinking. (They
didn’t understand my music at all; early on
my music became quite dissonant, more dissonant
than it is now. That was the ultra-modern style
then, to be very dissonant,) My mother knew that
I was busy composing, that I took piano lessons,
that I was reading all the time. I wasn’t
looking to my parents for ways to fill my time or
for direction. So it was fine with them.
Q. So you stopped going to school at
fourteen?
A. Yes. I was a good student. I was the top
member of my class at the age of twelve. But it
was a very wise decision because it would have
been a waste of my time. And I read very widely.
The only thing that I missed was some science
education. But how much of that I would have
gotten, I don’t know. It is not a cause of
deep regret. It was certainly the right thing for
me to do. So I worked with Ruth all those years.
I also went to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
every week. For fifty cents you could go and hear
this great orchestra and I, of course, got to
know the repertoire very well.
Q. Were your works being performed at all
during that time?
A. When I was about fifteen, Ruth or Mme. Herz
introduced me to Henry Cowell. And I began a
correspondence with a number of composers. I
think Cowell was the first one. When I was
sixteen, he [had my solo for oboe] performed in a
concert in New York of the Pan-American
Association of Composers which he founded with
Varese and Charles Seeger and some other people.
I was really launched on my professional career
at that age. Another composer who became
interested in my work was Dane Rudhyar [whose
works] follow in the path of Scriabin. And then I
also met a Hungarian composer, Imre Weisshaus
[known during his work in the French Resistance
as Paul Anna], a young colleague of Bartok, and
he became interested in my music and had it
performed at the Bauhaus and by the International
Society for Contemporary Music. So early on I
began to have a professional life. I didn’t
miss high school at all.
Q. So you moved to New York about this
time?
A. At eighteen. Ruth had gone to New York when
I was seventeen. She had a scholarship with her
teacher [in Chicago], Adolf Weidig, who was a
good harmony teacher. He didn’t succeed in
teaching me harmony, though. That’s another
story. (I was doing fine without conventional
harmony.) But I worked with him during that year,
and then I went to New York when I was eighteen.
And Ruth was there, and she was working with
Charles Seeger at that point.
[In conversation following the taped
interview Fine told the story of the manuscript
of Ruth Crawford’s Sonata for Violin and
Piano which Crawford herself had purposely
destroyed. Sometime after Crawford’s death,
Fine found herself in a discussion with a
conductor who was lamenting the loss of the
piece. a loss Fine didn’t know about as
Crawford had presented her with a hand-copied
manuscript in Chicago during her student days,
Realizing that she now owned the only extant copy
and about to move. Fine hand-carried the
manuscript to her new apartment, putting it in
what she thought was a safe place. Unfortunately,
in the confusion of moving, she forgot where she
had put it and was, as she said
“suicidal” at not being able to find
it. Years went by, Every time the subject of the
Crawford Violin Sonata came up in a conversation,
Fine said she just gave a sickly smile and
didn’t know what to say. Then one day her
husband, sculptor Benjamin Karp, came across some
music in a portfolio of his drawings. The music
was the long-lost sonata. Charles Seeger wanted
to authenticate his wife’s manuscript and
did so personally, driving at age 92 to see it
and, glancing at the first page. saying,
“Yes, that’s Ruth’s
hand.” Fine arranged to make a gift of the
manuscript to the Library of Congress and gave a
performance of it there (the first since the
Chicago premiere) in the 1980s.]
Q. I’m also interested in your own
performing — as a pianist. You were
continuing that at this time?
A. Yes. I was. I didn’t realize it, but
I was really perfecting my skills as a modern
pianist in Chicago in those years because I would
buy everything that I could and learn to play
difficult things, new music. And when I came to
New York, I wasn’t there for more than a
couple of weeks when I applied for a job as a
dance accompanist. It was expected in my family
that you supported yourself. It wasn’t a
moral expectation at all; they simply had no
money to support me. So I found this job in the
depths of the depression [with] a dance company.
And it was unbelievable what I did: I would play
the score of Petrouchka on the piano, the whole
thing. And also Strauss’ Salome, I
would just plough ahead from the piano reduction.
It was a lot to play. I began to be known as a
performer of contemporary music almost
immediately in New York. I was a good sight
reader of contemporary music. People were quite
amazed. I had been working at this in Chicago; I
was really ready.
And also at this time I became a member of a
very interesting group formed by Aaron Copland
called the Young Composers Group. (This is in
Vivian Perlis’ book.) I don’t know if
we met every week but certainly every other week
at Copland’s apartment. There weren’t
tape recorders and very few recordings of
contemporary music, so we would read through some
new works and everybody brought their new pieces.
He wasn’t a teacher; it was a group where
we shared our music. It was wonderful, absolutely
wonderful. Copland always had this very nurturing
aspect to him; he liked to be in contact with
young composers and to help them. I was the only
woman; there really were no other young women
around. I think the most striking difference
between that scene through the ’30s was
that there were so few composers of contemporary
music. Now we have them by the hundreds, by the
thousands maybe. There were very, very few; you
could name no more than ten over the whole
country: Varese, Ruggles, Cowell, we were just
beginning to know about Ives, Copland, Virgil
Thomson. A dozen, that’s all. And then the
younger composers also, not more than a
dozen.
Q. So everybody knew each other?
A. Everybody knew each other and we made a
community, not necessarily (it’s no pun)
harmonious, but we felt we were part of the
avant-garde. Even if we were studying, we
didn’t feel like students. And we were
forging a new kind of music. Maybe not all of it
was great, but it was an exciting time then.
There were no grants, or almost no grants. The
Guggenheim, I think, began in 1929; Ruth was the
first woman to get a Guggenheim, one of the few.
It was a completely different scene where you
realized you were pioneering with what you were
doing. Not with any sense of grandeur but with a
sense of independence. I think we all felt this.
There was a lot of talk then of “What is
American music?” The group was formed
shortly after Copland wrote his Variations. I
remember I proofread them for him. He had me sit
down and he said, “You play it; don’t
worry about the rhythm.” So he was able to
see what notes were wrong. And there were at
least a couple of occasions where I played some
pieces of mine and he played the Variations. At
one concert where I was playing the first
performance of a work by Chavez, Aaron Copland
turned pages for me. He had no vanity; he was
pretty sure of what he was doing.
Q. It is interesting to me that you say
Copland was so nurturing not only to the other
composers but to you as a woman because in his
writing he has sometimes said that a woman cannot
be a composer, that there have been no great
women composers.
A. Well. he wasn’t that wav with me. He
arranged a festival called the First Yaddo
Festival; he invited me to perform my works, and
he introduced me to Antheil. and I played my
works for Antheil. And he knew the works of Ruth
Crawford. Certainly there was never any
condescension; maybe he forgot about me when he
wrote that!
Q. Now during this period you became
interested in writing music for dance
companies?
A. Yes, I became very well known as a dance
accompanist. Again, these were the great days of
pioneering with Martha Graham and Doris Humphrey
and Charles Weidman and one or two others: they
were forging American dance. In 1933 or ‘34
I became the accompanist for Doris Humphrey and
Charles Weidman. I played for their classes and I
toured with them. I met Martha Graham. When I was
about 24, Doris asked me to write a ballet for
her, The Race of Life. So I wrote that
one and I wrote a ballet for Charles Weidman
[Opus 51], and two for Hanya Holm
[Tragic Exodus and They Too Are
£xiles]. Later on I wrote a ballet for
Jose Limon [My Son, My Enemy]. And much
later, 1960, I wrote a ballet for Martha Graham
[Alcestis]. It was great to see American
dance being made. The afficionados flocked to the
concerts, and the dancers operated on a
shoestring: there were no grants. Martha would be
sewing costumes before the concerts.
After I had done that until about 1937 or
‘38, I stopped doing so many dance classes
because I thought that was taking up my time. I
didn’t want to devote so much time to it.
And I had gotten married at the pitiful young age
of 21.
Q. Well, it seems to have lasted.
A. Yes, it did. I’m glad I am married to
my husband: we still love each other. but it
would have been better for me if I had been a
more mature person. My parents came to New York
before my father lost his job. (Everybody lost
their job in the Depression.) And I came straight
from living at home to getting married and I
think it is much better to have a period where
you forge your own life.
Q. I’m wondering if you look on some of
your work such as The Women in the
Garden and Meeting for Equal Rights
1866 as feminist works, which certainly the
subject matter suggests, and if so how you came
to write those particular ones and if there are
other ones that are in that same vein.
A. What does feminist mean? I don’t mean
to put you on the spot but…
Q. Well, in my own work I have done a series
of vocal works that are settings of either poetry
by women or on an historical woman. I
wouldn’t necessarily call them feminist
works in the sense of having a political agenda,
but I think of them as feminist in the sense of
wanting to present a woman’s point of view
that would be different in some wav from a
man’s. But I thought perhaps the Meeting
for Equal Rights might be political because
certainly that was a political moment.
A. Yes. Well certainly women have been very
important in my life. My mother was a nurturing
influence. She saw when I was a small child that
I had ability. She had no background: she was
very intelligent, but she had come from a Russian
Jewish family and started to work herself when
she was fourteen. But she knew that art and
things of the intellect were important. My
parents were not religious at all: they were
agnostics. But the value of learning and
acquiring knowledge is a very important value
among the Jewish people and that she had. So my
mother was very important in my life. I have two
sisters I have been very close to all my life.
lifelong friends. Ruth was a very important
influence. Mme. Herz was an important influence.
I had women teachers. I had some men teachers too
[Roger Sessions J, but women were very important.
And I myself have found since the ’60s that
the woman’s movement has been a liberating
influence for me personally–to realize how
men treat women, how women react to being treated
by men. Our marriage has had to survive some of
these things too, but it’ s possible to
learn. So it came very naturally and seemed
perfectly natural to have an all-women opera
[Gertrude Stein, Isadora Duncan, Virginia Woolf
& Emily Dickinson] with one character called
the Tenor. It certainly has to do with
women’s feelings, the bonding of women and
the things they have had to endure. For instance,
at one point in Women in the Garden
there is a quotation from Emily Dickinson of
scenes of her own death. She says, “When I
died, the clerk recorded it in the town ledger as
Emily Dickinson, at home.” It means that
she was taking care of her father. Not [Emily
Dickinson] a poet. And then Isadora Duncan was
treated so terribly by Gordon Craig, and
that’s in there too. He is saying,
“My work, my work; why do you have to go on
the stage and wave your arms!” He wrote
this to her in a letter. “Why do you have
to go on the stage and wave your arms” to
Isadora Duncan! She suffered a great deal from
that. There is a lot of that in there. Gertrude
Stein is the philosopher, as she usually is. The
tenor at one point is kind of Picasso; he’s
her friend. And there is a long episode in there
from Virginia Woolf from A Room of
One’s Own. I hope I did it with a
light hand, but all those concerns were real and
they are real.
[At the reception after the performance of
her Hymns for two pianos, cello and horn,
Fine discussed Women in the Garden further,
concluding with the admission that unlike other
pieces which she was glad to complete and eager
to finish. Women in the Garden was different in
that she became so interested and involved with
the characters that she was reluctant to leave
them.]
Q. I have seen The Women in the
Garden, but I don’t know Meeting
for Equal Rights 1866.
A. It has to do with women trying to get the
vote in that period, and the vile things that
were said. I am just now writing a new opera.
It’s an opera in the form of a newsreel.
And there’s one part in which the
librettist has excerpted remarks by the head of
the musicians’ union in Chicago, and he
says, “Women should not play in orchestras;
the only thing that women should play is the
harp; women playing instruments should be seated
in a discrete position and a woman cannot be in a
discrete position if she plays the cello.”
Dirty mind, if you ask me. It’s all being
set [to music]!
Q. What do you call this opera?
A. It’s called by the name of the
heroine, a Russian woman composer, Uliana Rooney.
She has seven husbands, each having a different
musical style. She actually takes the name of
one, a union organizer by the name of Rooney. So
her name is Uliana Rooney, kind of a crazy name,
but I like it. So I am engaged with that now.
Certainly we are going to deal with some of these
issues: what it was like to be a woman.
Q. Do you have a particular performance in
mind?
A. I got a Lila Wallace/Meet the Composer
grant, and it will be done in New York and then
in Houston by a group called Voices of
Change.
Q. Is it a chamber opera, just two or three
singers?
A. There will be, I think, five people and
seven instruments. I found with Women in the
Garden that people really come after you if
you have a chamber opera because there are groups
that do very, very well. But if it’s grand
opera, the expense is too great. I started to
talk about this because it has this
[women’s] element. It is just plain
history. Also in Women in the Garden,
[and] Meeting for Equal Rights was also
about that. There were some terrible things on
the U.S. Senate floor alluding to women having
periodic problems, that they shouldn’t be
allowed to be lawyers because they might not be
able to make a very good appearance. Just
disgusting! I don’t feel bitter about these
things, but they are outrageous.
Q. So you are more outraged on behalf of other
women than for yourself.
A. Yes. Sometimes I get outraged for
myself.
Q. Do you feel you have suffered to any
significant degree from any kind of prejudice
against women composers?
A. No. Now women get performances by
orchestras but for many years they didn’t.
I don’t have any great orchestral works to
perform, but I would probably have written them,
undoubtedly would have written them.
There’s no question: you couldn’t get
a performance by a big orchestra. Forget it!
Q. You mean, being a woman.
A. Yes. Nobody took it seriously. I remember
once at a performance of the Race of
Life which I orchestrated from the early
version (this was done by the Juilliard dance
company), a very well known colleague of mine who
was very friendly said. “I liked the
orchestration very much, very much. Did you do it
yourself?” I said to the so-and-so,
“Don’t you do yours?” That is
all I said. Do I do the orchestration! We are
talking about the late ’50s. I think a lot
of ground has been gained. So who knows if
didn’t suffer for certain things. But
certainly since the ’60s or ’70s I
have been very fortunate.
Q. One other thing I would like to talk about
is your approach to writing: whether —
since you are a pianist — you work at the
piano or whether you work away from it, whether
you imagine works in their entirety to some
extent or sketch out an overall plan or whether
you begin at the beginning and write until you
get to the double bar, or whether it differs from
piece to piece.
A. Until 1969 I wrote at the piano. At that
point I was writing a work for twelve brass
instruments and chorus, and I found that the
piano was beginning to get in my way as far as my
imagining the sounds. So then I began to compose
away from the piano. I find that the piano
disturbs my inner hearing in the sense that I am
imagining instruments and then hear the sound of
the piano; it bothers me. For works like-as a
matter of fact for all my works, I score them
immediately; I don’t make a piano
[reduction]. I had that experience with the brass
piece.
I don’t have a conscious idea of how the
piece will go. It interests me that when I write,
and I’m sure it’s true of anybody
that writes, they know what belongs in the piece
and what doesn’t belong in the piece.
That’s a very mysterious thing if you think
about it. You say, “It doesn’t go in
there.” There must be an unconscious sense
of the whole work somewhere to do that.
Otherwise, you wouldn’t have any idea of
what fit. My brother-in-law told me about an
article on organic unity by Oliver Sachs in New
York magazine. And he said it dealt exactly with
this. And I’m not a good reviser. The only
way I can revise a work is about five years after
I’ve written it. Then I can stand away from
it.
Q. Have you done that often?
A. Sometimes. I don’t remember when I
began doing that. I consider now all the works
I’ve written part of me, and I go back, and
I might use revisions from an early work, just
because I like it. Is it right to do this
plagiarism, self- plagiarism?
Q. It’s funny you should say that
because last year I was writing one work right
after another and I felt that it was almost like
one piece in a certain sense, that I was even
borrowing from one into another.
A. Exactly. Even if! use something from
another piece the fact that it has other material
brings out another aspect. A colleague of mine
told me that Mozart did a lot of this. So we are
in good company.
So I have always been a morning person. I do
copying usually in the afternoons. I try now not
to work in the evenings. Enough is enough. It
just gets my brain overactive. I tend to be not
too critical when I write. If I veer off
somewhere in the wrong direction, I’ll stop
and find the point, but when it’s going
smoothly, it goes pretty well.
Q. So you write fairly quickly?
A. Yes, I do. I find it takes a long time to
copy a score; I don’t mind copying the
parts, but score-copying is very laborious. And
friends of mine who make scores on computers say
it is equally long.
Q. Do you like the copying process?
A. I like to copy the score; I really enjoy
copying the score.
Q. Do you make changes sometimes during that
process?
A. Yes. I might make some changes, minor
changes. I write 25 or 30 pages, then 1 start
copying so 1 don’t kill myself doing all
the copying. So it puts the whole thing back into
the memory bank more securely.
Q. But that also means that you cannot change
the beginning.
A. That’s true. Of course, I could
recopy it. No, 1 must feel sure I like it. I
don’t feel sure until I’ve written
about 25 or 30 pages because I am still looking
for–some people call it the matrix, the
defining idea, the defining impulse (I’m
not talking about a tune or a harmony) and the
defining sense of the form. [For example,] 1
wasn’t quite sure what was happening in
this work [Uliana Rooney] until I got the idea,
“This is a newsreel.” And then 1 saw
it wasn’t a question of conflicting [ideas,
impulses], it wasn’t a drama, and it
wasn’t so much about people making contacts
with each other as I did in Women in the Garden,
but it was an unfolding through time. And once
you get that, that’s a lucky day when that
happens.
Q. Now you must write almost entirely on
commission at this point in your life.
A. Yes, after years of not having that. I got
my first significant commission in the seventies.
I was already very much of a grown up lady. There
weren’t many commissions around, and I
didn’t get a Guggenheim until I was
sixty-seven.
Q. Do you think that that was
discriminatory.
A. I don’t think I knew the right people
at that time, Now I didn’t know anybody at
the Guggenheim either, but in terms of my career
I did one very smart thing in my life. In 1973 I
decided to give a concert in New York of my own
works. I didn’t even think of having the
critics. 1 just wanted to give this concert. For
one thing I had the assistance of my marvelous
colleagues, performers, at Bennington, They are
top-notch people. And I had gotten to know Jan
DeGaetani when she was a substitute here at
Bennington. She was more than happy to sing.
[As the tape ran out and I was flipping
the cassette, Fine continued the story of the
1973 concert, saying that a critic from the New
York Times did show up after all, gave her a
glowing review. and she found herself receiving a
lot more attention afterwards. The following
excerpts from the review (4/15/73) by Donal
Henahan give a sense not only of the music but
also of Fine’s personality: “The
10-part mass…left an impression of distant
times and cool cathedrals. The composer also gave
the first performance of her Concerto for Piano,
Strings and Percussion (1972) in which she
functioned as a one-woman band. Although heavily
in debt to Cowell, lves and Cage, the Concerto w
as absorbing in its aural sensitivity and its
tongue -in-cheek manner… The Neruda songs
made a delicious pair… The singer silenced
the pianist (Miss Fine) by gently closing the
lid, removing the music, and, finally, dropping
the key covering. The final chord was played
woodenly but expressively by Miss Fine, a
marvelous straight-woman.”]
Boston composer Elizabeth Vercoe is an
associate editor of this journal.