Conversations with
Vivian Fine: A Maverick Tradition
by Tim Brookes
Quadrille. Spring 1986, Bennington,
Vermont
(including excerpts from the one-hour special,
“A Celebration of the Music of Vivian
Fine,” produced for National Public Radio
by the International League of Women Composers in
1986. Fine was interviewed by Susan Cook, then
professor of music at Middlebury College)
Vivian Fine credits three women with
recognizing her musical abilities at an early age
and helping her develop them. The first was an
aunt who lived a few blocks away in Chicago and
owned a piano. At the age of three, Vivian was
fascinated by the instrument.
“I didn’t bang it. I would touch
one note and listen to it. I had never even heard
a pianist; I had just heard this
piano.”
Fine, now widely recognized as one of
America’s leading composers and described
by Gunther Schuller as “in this grand old
American maverick tradition of… Ives, Harry
Partch and John Cage,” is the subject of
“Vivian Fine,” a program produced by
Ev Grimes for the International League of Women
Composers in celebration of International
Women’s Day on March 8th. The program will
feature a selection of Fine’s music
spanning more than fifty years, starting with
“Four Songs,” a piece for voice and
string quartet she composed in 1932 at the age of
nineteen.
“My sister already had violin lessons
– she was three years older than I was
– and then one day I came home – I
was a very mild and equable child –and I
suddenly threw a fit. I threw myself on the
threshold between two rooms and I started
screaming and kicking. And what was it? I wanted
piano lessons. And I remember Piatagorsky once
told me this can happen with gifted children:
they have a fit. It’s a passion. And so my
mother said, ‘All right, all
right,child,’ and she said,
‘We’ll get the
piano.’”
This was easier said than done. They
couldn’t afford to buy a piano, and so her
parents had to lug the piano over from her
aunt’s house. Vivian had no idea what
sacrifices her parents were making for her; she
still doesn’t know where they found the
money. But although her father had to leave
school at eight and her mother at 14 to go out to
work, both believed in reading and the study of
music.
The next woman in the developing
pianist’s life turned out to be something
less that a positive influence. Vivian’s
mother soon realized that her daughter would need
a professional piano teacher.
“But there was no money. There was this
neighborhood teacher who went around from house
to house, I think she got 50 cents a
lesson—this was in the Twenties. Her name
was Miss Rosen. Miss Rosen said she didn’t
teach any child until they were eight. Mama said
‘Please come in and hear
her.’”
Miss Rosen was duly impressed and agreed to
teach the prodigy, who was already playing and
memorizing pieces at the age of five, but the
relationship didn’t work out very well.
“Her method of teaching was to hit me
over the hand with a flyswatter if I played the
wrong note. I don’t know about Miss
Rosen,” she added drily.
When she was twelve, Vivian began to study
harmony with the woman who would develop the
child’s genius, introduce her to the world
of international music and help her befriend some
of the country’s leading composers: Ruth
Crawford Seeger. Within a few months, Seeger
asked her to compose a piece for piano, and from
that moment “nothing interested me other
than composing music.”
“She was a composer, and she was writing
very bold, innovative music. We didn’t know
the expression ‘role model’ back
then, but she certainly was a role model for me.
I didn’t think of her as an example though;
she was just a person in my life who meant a
great deal to me.”
Her mother, meanwhile, was still playing a
crucial role in supporting Vivian’s music
and at the same time, perhaps, helping to
reinforce the maverick streak. After a brilliant
elementary school career, at 14 Vivian decided to
drop out of high school.
“It was an awful high school. There were
fifty students in it and I wasn’t learning
anything. The point at which I decided I
didn’t want to go to school any more was
when we were asked to memorize the number of post
offices in the United States. It was a class call
Civics. A small voice said to me ‘ I
don’t want to do this.’”
Vivian, who had read Victor Hugo at nine and
almost all of Dickens by the age of eleven, was
the kind of child some mothers would have pushed
towards glittering scholarly success, but Mrs.
Fine recognized her daughter’s needs more
clearly.
“I didn’t tell my mother I
didn’t want to go to school, I just started
not going.” Taking piano and composition
lessons and reading at home, “I had my own
music and art school right at home. It was
absolutely the wisest thing I could have done,
and I would spend four or five hours a day
composing. That’s where I got the habit,
and my own instinct was that this was exactly the
time to do it, not wait till I went to college or
something. Actually, my parents couldn’t
possibly have afforded to send me to
college.”
Her parents, meanwhile, were willing
accomplices.
“I remember my mother hid me in a closet
one day when the truant officer came
by.”
Living with a prodigy who was picking up
Crawford Seeger’s “modern”
composition styles was no easy task.
“Both my father and my mother were
infinitely patient. We had to move several times
due to my constant playing of the piano,
especially those modern compositions I was
writing. They were very dissonant. Neighbors
would object to this going on for five or six
hours a day.” Her parents patiently moved
every time, dragging the family and the piano
from apartment to apartment. “They were
fantastic. I could never have been as good a
parent as they were.”
“Without my mother I wouldn’t be a
musician,” said the member of the American
Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters.
“You need the involvement of a parent.
It’s not just saying ‘That’s
nice darling’ – the parents has to
become really involved.”