Vivian Fine: American
Music Series Interviews
Courtesy of Oral
History, American Music, Yale University,
Interviewer: Frances Harmeyer
American Music Series Interview Number
50
North Bennington, Vt. June 28, 1975
H. [I am talking with] Vivian Fine at her home
in Bennington, Vermont. I’d like to start
with background questions, like, you were born in
Chicago?
F. Right.
H. And started piano when you were really
quite young.
F. Five.
H. Five, right. Did your parents decide that
that was a good thing for you to do, or, was
that, I don’t know how much you can decide
when you’re five.
F. Actually, it was I who insisted that I have
piano lessons. My older sister, who’s three
years older that I am, was having violin lessons,
and I had had contact with a piano at an
aunt’s house, and I remember being
fascinated with the sound of the piano. And, I,
one day, burst into tears and had a fit, and told
my mother I had to have piano lessons. She,
having no idea of this intense feeling on my
part, was quite surprised, and, of course, gave
me lessons. She taught me first. My mother knew a
little bit about playing the piano, and is
actually a musical person. So she taught me for a
little while and then she got a neighborhood
teacher for me, and then very shortly after that,
I got a scholarship at the Chicago Musical
College. This was still before I was six.
H. Oh, my goodness. How long were you at the
Chicago school?
F. I think I stayed for three years. It was
shortly before I was six when I got it, and I
left there before I was nine. I stayed there and
then I studied with a series of private teachers
in Chicago. The most important of these teachers
was a woman by the name of Djane Lavoie-Herz, who
was, I think, I believe she’s still alive
now, who had been in contact with Scriabin, had
studied with him, or at least had been in his
circle, and from her I got to know
Scriabin’s music. I worked with her on some
of the works, and actually, at that time, I
started to work with her when I was eleven, began
playing the late works of Scriabin, in, say,
1928. I have a piece, the opus 74, Preludes,
which was his last opus. I had the notation
there, that I played them in 1928. Looking back
on that, I realize that those were written in
1914. That was just fourteen years before 1928.
To me, at that time, they belonged to the past,
music of the past. I was very excited about them
and very interested in them, but I realize now
that fourteen years wasn’t such a very,
very long time. So I was really, in a sense,
playing new music, quite new music at that
time.
H. Oh, right.
F. And I was very fortunate to be able to work
with her on these pieces which she had heard
Scriabin play. She was also the piano teacher for
Ruth Crawford, who later became Ruth Crawford
Seeger. And it was through her that I met Ruth
Crawford, and through Djane Herz that I also
began to study with Ruth Crawford. Madame Herz,
as we called her, she was Canadian,
French–Canadian background, she wanted me
to have harmony lessons, so it started out with
my studying harmony with Ruth Crawford. I must
have been a little under twelve then, and one day
she asked me to write a piece; I had been
studying a little bit of theory, actually, no
harmony, but just theory. I still have those old
notebooks with the modes and writing notes on
enharmonic change. She asked me to write a piece,
and I wrote a piece, I still have that piece,
too. And I could see that she listened to it with
great attention, and ever since, after that, I
composed constantly. I never stopped composing.
But it really grew out of her asking me to write
a piece. I don’t know what would have
happened if she hadn’t asked me to write a
piece, and also her reaction to it. Perhaps
nothing more would have happened if she’d
have asked me, but her reaction, and her also
being a composer. And through her I met, and
through Madame Herz, I also met Henry Cowell and
Dane Rudhyar. This was when I was still in my
early teens, fourteen or fifteen years old. And
these and Ruth Crawford, herself, became very
important influences in my life.
H. Did Ruth Crawford–you studied with
her when you were in your teens?
F. Yes, that’s right, from about the
time I was about twelve through until I was
seventeen. A long time, and we became good
friends.
H. Did you want to be a composer–did you
tell Ruth Crawford that you wanted to be a
composer, or was it something you did outside of
your playing the piano? What kind of professional
aspirations did you have when you were in your
teens?
F. Well, that’s an interesting question,
because I never wanted to be a composer. I was a
composer. I never thought about that. I never
wanted to be a composer, in that sense. I
didn’t think “well, you know,
it’s something I’d like to do.”
I began to compose and actually never thought of
myself as a composer. I was, soon after that,
say, when I was about fourteen, composing became
my main activity. I quit high school, I
couldn’t stand it. I told my mother I
didn’t want to go to high school, and that
was alright with her.
H. Wonderful!
F. Yes, it was marvelous. [laughter] What I
did four or five hours a day was to compose, and
I had many of these early compositions. They were
pretty wild. I, early, became very much
interested and drawn into the avant-garde
contemporary idiom of the time through Ruth
Crawford mainly, I suppose, and also through my
contact with Madame Herz, with late Scriabin
works. So I began to compose and I began to know
composers at that time, some of the most
interesting composers in the United States. But I
never said, “Well, I’ll become a
Composer.” I just was composing and people
were looking at my music and then when I was
sixteen and a half, Henry Cowell had one of my
works performed, a work for solo oboe, performed
by the Pan-American Society for Contemporary
Music. It was one of the important societies at
the time, founded by himself and Varèse and
Ives. So that I was a composer. In my piano
playing, I had had the kind of education that
children who are early gifted in childhood, not
the education so much, but I was given the
aspirations to be, quote “a great pianist,
to play the literature.”
F. But this never came about in my composing.
I just composed, and I composed in the idiom of
the people who were close to me were interested
in–an avant-garde idiom. So that it never
occurred to me “Well, I’m going to
become a composer”–I composed. To me
that would be a very, I think this is, would be
an odd question for a person to ask themselves,
though I suppose, it’s possible to say,
“Yes, I will be a painter,” and
decide to be a painter. I suppose this could come
about. But, it was too early, I was too young. It
began too early for me to formulate this in terms
of a career, and the professionalism just
happened. As I say, I had my first important
performance, my first performance, with an
important organization. Then I was published when
I was nineteen. So things happened very quickly
for me, and I had had other European
performances.
H. What was your first published work?
F. The first published work was “The
Four Songs” which were published in the New
Music edition, and interestingly enough, there
was just in the last issue of Perspectives of New
Music–there is an analysis of one of these
songs, by Steven Gilbert, who teaches out at the
State University at Fresno. I don’t know
him, but he was looking at the works in the New
Music Edition, and he liked this–these
songs of mine very much and he gave it an
extended analysis. An analysis that I found most
interesting, but which as far as I can recall,
had no part in my conscious thinking at the time.
That’s not to invalidate the analysis.
H. When you moved to New York, which was in
1931, did you know people in New York? Is that
why you moved, or what?
F. Yes, I wanted, well, Henry Cowell was here,
and there was no one left really for me to study
with. Ruth had gone off, she’d gotten a
Guggenheim. The previous year, in, I guess, 1930,
she went to New York to study with Charles
Seeger. She left. She actually had a scholarship
with Adolph Weidig at the American Conservatory
of Music. So I studied harmony and composition
with him, much to the learned gentleman’s
bewilderment. He was a very fine person, a fine
musician and has written a good harmony book. But
I didn’t do things the orthodox way and I
was, I imagine, somewhat of a bewilderment to
him. But, anyway, I did study with him then. And
then when Ruth left, and I realized that I
didn’t want to go on studying with
Professor Weidig–he was a scholar and
composer of a very definite traditional school.
So there was only one place for me to go and that
was New York. I thought of going to study with
Charles Seeger, who Ruth studied with and later
married. I don’t know why we didn’t
pursue that. I seem to remember one lesson, and I
remember a lesson or two with Wallingford
Riegger, but that wasn’t pursued. In the
end, it was a few years later, in 1934, I guess
it was, I began to study with Roger Sessions, and
by that time a whole new climate had set in, as
far as the avant-garde. It was the end of the
avant-garde really, the end of an era.
H. In New York?
F. All over the country.
H. Oh.
F. If you look at the music in the New Music
Editions, you see it becoming more, less and less
avant-garde. Why this happened, I think, is an
involved question, having to do partly with the
Depression, certainly. But it was a period,
during which Varèse didn’t write for
ten, eleven, or twelve years. It was just not a
propitious time for experimental music, and I
stopped writing experimental music, and began to
write much more conventional music. And only
returned to, began to return slowly, to this
earlier idiom around 1946.
H. There’s an article by Wallingford
Riegger in one of the American Composers Alliance
Bulletins about your music. He divided your
music, your composition, into three different
periods which sound like what you just said. I
was wondering if you agreed with that.
F. Yes, absolutely. And what would have been,
the twelve-tone composers like Milton Babbitt and
some others, continued to write twelve-tone music
during this period, when Schoenberg was in this
country at this time. But the composers I’m
talking about really weren’t twelve-tone
composers, they were experimental composers. And
almost all of them stopped writing. Ruggles
didn’t write, or wrote almost nothing.
Cowell’s music changed entirely, and so
there must have been some large forces at work to
have caused us all to change.
H. Let me see–when you were in New York,
you were always performing new music, and from
what I’ve been able to gather from the
literature that I’ve read, you were
somewhat of a leader, a revolutionary, maybe, in
that aspect. You formed the American Composers
Alliance?
F. I was one of the founders of the Alliance.
Actually, there was another organization that we
had before, I forget the exact name of it, and
the headquarters for it was my apartment on
Bleeker Street. Wallingford Riegger was a part of
that too. And this group was active in forming
the American Composers Alliance. I was very
active in performing new music in the ‘30s.
I gave a number of first performances, some of
the first performances of music by Ruth Crawford,
Carlos Chavez, Ives, and other people. And I had
spent a lot of time in Chicago when I was
fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, playing a lot of
this music, just on my own. I didn’t study
this with my teacher, and it stood me in good
stead, when it came to perform, this was
considered very difficult music, at that
time.
H. What kind of opposition did you run across,
from the traditional musical scene in New York,
when you were in the avant-garde? Were there
critical reviews of all this “new
music?”
F. Well, at that time, when I first came to
New York, that must have been in the winter of,
couldn’t have been 1931, must have been the
winter of ‘32, or maybe the fall of
‘32. Copland formed, he didn’t form
really so much, but he attracted to himself, a
group of young composers: Henry Brant was among
them, and Elie Siegmeister, was Elie Siegmeister
in the group, yes, I think he was. Well, anyway,
we would meet fairly regularly, maybe once a week
or once every two weeks at Copland’s place,
and play each other’s music. I won’t
say there was a lot of brotherly and sisterly
love, but we were a group interested in each
other’s music, and occasionally we’d
have visitors. I remember George Antheil came to
visit the group and see what we were doing. We
were really the young people. Some of them were
under twenty like myself and Henry Brant. Most of
us were–probably the oldest was
twenty-five.
H. Oh, my goodness.
F. Really young composers. So there was a
group of young people that made life easier for
us. We just weren’t completely isolated.
And I remember Virgil Thomson was also a visitor.
I remember him saying to me at that time,
“You have a good name for a
composer.” And Aaron said to him,
“You wouldn’t like her music.”
[laughter] Subsequently, Virgil did like my music
and was very helpful to me. Now, your question
was the isolation, about the criticism. My answer
is that there was a group, there was also the
League of Composers there. They performed my Four
Songs. Also, there was one other group or
associated with the group, was Arthur Berger, who
at that time was doing very little composing, but
was a critic for the New York Daily Mirror. I
think, yes, that was it. And he was a staunch
advocate of new music and of my music so that
there was at least one good review.
H. Wonderful. [laughter]
F. Reviews are strange things, you know, and
one wonders about the role in one’s life.
This work that you mentioned hearing in New York
this year, The Great Wall of China, which I wrote
in 1947. When it was first performed at Columbia,
Olin Downes gave it a crushing review, which
crushed–which I wasn’t very happy
about. But this year it got favorable mention
from the critic in the Times. Probably, one
shouldn’t be affected too much by these
things. And I certainly am less affected by them
than I was then. But for a young composer
it’s different. When you’re twenty
years old, what appears in the paper seems very
important.
H. For sure. I was wondering if being a leader
in the avant-garde in New York, if you had
trouble being part of founding the American
Composers Alliance, but I suppose that nucleus of
composers around Aaron Copland kept everyone
going.
F. Well, actually, it was really taken over at
that point by Copland, William Schuman and a
group of composers who were much more successful
than I was.
H. How did you come in contact with Doris
Humphrey and Martha Graham and–were you a
dancer?
F. No, no, I wasn’t. When I came to New
York in 1931, during the depths of the
depression, I didn’t have any money. My
parents had given me $50, which was very kind of
them, and my railroad fare. And there was no
question in my mind that I would have to support
myself. I was eighteen years old. The thing that
occurred to me to do was to be a dance
accompanist. And so I started in that field and
was “successful.” That is, I was busy
as I could possibly, as I wanted to be. And very
shortly I became the pianist for Doris Humphrey
and Charles Weidman. I used to play their
concerts and tour for them, tour with them, and
then I began, they asked me to write music for
them. And I wrote two large ballets for them: The
Race of Life for Doris and Opus 51 for Charles
and [indistinct]. The work with Martha Graham was
much later. I stopped writing dance music about
1938. I realized that I was–it was taking
up a lot of my time, and I felt I was going too
far into writing music for dance, so I stopped
writing music for dance, but I didn’t write
anything more until 1960, when I wrote the
Alcestis for Martha Graham. And then in 1964-65,
I wrote a work for José Limon.
H. What are your favorite genres? Do you have
one, or, I read an article that named you as one
of the great American songwriters, and talked
about–
F. Where did you read that? I haven’t
read it.
H. Let me see, I can’t remember who
wrote it or where– it’s in my notes,
I can show you. [laughter]
F. Fine, it’s just the same. Well you
mean, genre in the sense of do I like to write
chamber music or orchestra music? Is that what
you mean? Not idiom?
H. I probably meant idiom.
F. No, no, do you mean idiom, or do you mean
the type of music? Do you mean style? Are you
talking about what people call style? Do I write
tonal music or whether I prefer to write chamber
music or orchestra music?
H. I’d like to know about both of those
things. Start with idiom.
F. Let’s just call it types of music,
whether I like to write chamber music, orchestra
music or choral music. It really doesn’t
matter at all to me. It doesn’t make any
difference at all. Lately, I’ve been
working a lot with words. I’ve written a
big piece, twenty-four-five minute piece for
eight singers, and string quartet. I’d
originally thought of having it done with a small
chorus, but I think the chances of it being done
with a small chorus are not too great. It’s
not an easy piece, but it will be fine with eight
singers. And I’ve loved working with that,
and now I’m writing a big piece for
orchestra and chorus and soloists. Now, I’m
looking forward to the time I can write a piano
concerto, that’s probably, after I write a
chamber opera, which I’m obligated to do
and I want to do, I’ll write a piano
concerto. It really doesn’t matter at all
to me. I’ve written a great deal of chamber
music, just because it’s been next to
impossible for me to have any orchestral
performances. So that, it doesn’t make much
sense to write music, a piece of music which
you’re not going to hear. I love to write
for orchestra, and will try to find opportunities
in the future to have works performed. So as far
as that goes, it doesn’t make any
difference to me. I can get very interested in
writing a piece for solo flute, which I wrote
recently.
H. Oh boy!
F. That’s for you, Frances. And–I
just get interested in the work I’m
writing. As far as idiom goes, it’s
perfectly true my idiom has changed over the
years, in various ways, but, I
suppose–let’ s put it this way,
composing is composing and I certainly have been
affected by some of the ideas that came into
being in the late fifties and the sixties of, how
shall I say, music that was less sequential in
the old-fashioned sense, that followed a certain
kind of syntax or sequence, which developed from
the past. But I don’t–the pieces of
mine in the past that I consider valid,
musically, are just that to me. So that I just
write in the idiom I’m writing at that
time.
H. One of the major considerations of what you
write is the possibility of it being
performed?
F. It’s getting to be more and more
that. Often I would write a work, just because I
wanted to write it and would just hope to get it
performed. But I do less and less of that now,
just because it just becomes terribly difficult
to do that. In the last two or three years,
I’ve had quite a few one-woman shows, that
is, concerts just of my music. And I found that a
very gratifying format. And for such a concert I
would write, for instance–one concert in
New York I produced myself. I got very wonderful
colleagues, my colleagues at Bennington, and Jan
DeGaetani, singer, to perform. I asked them to
perform, and they were glad to. So, I mean, I
produced it in that sense. And the songs, there
were some songs that I had especially written for
Jan. But now, I either would like to have a
commissioned work or at the very least a
performance possibility.
H. Where was this concert of all your
music?
F. That was in 1973 and we did it at Finch
College Concert Hall in New York, and this
was–I felt so good doing that, that
subsequently, I think I’ve given about
seven or eight, but most of the rest of them have
been at various colleges, at Mills College,
Berkeley, and Hayward in California. I gave one
at SUNY in New York, in New York State and so on.
So, it isn’t that I just perform myself,
it’s just all my own music and other people
help me perform it. I find it a very favorable
way for me to present my music, because it
isn’t just one piece that people hear in
isolation.
H. That s wonderful. Is it important for you
to conduct your own works, the works that need a
conductor? Do you prefer to do that?
F. Well, in the past this wasn’t so. I
have two recordings, both made in Japan, so I
didn’t supervise the rehearsals, or
anything about it. The conductor just had the
score. And I find them very satisfying and
gratifying to do. One is a piece for orchestra,
and another piece is for, well, both are
orchestra pieces. So that was just fine. It
worked out beautifully. When it’s been
necessary for me to conduct, I’m glad to do
it, but I’m glad to have a competent
conductor who is interested in presenting my
music, conduct it.
H. Have you ever had any difficulty, like when
you were a young struggling composer in New York,
did you have any difficulty being taken seriously
as a composer, since composition is traditionally
a male dominated field?
F. Well, in this composers’ group, for
instance, I was the only woman. I was the person
who was exceptional, like the exceptional
surgeon, or the exceptional engineer, the person
who was the exception, and so that particular
problem I never ran up against with my
colleagues. Sometimes, people say strange things
to me. At a performance of one of my ballets
which had been orchestrated, a composer said to
me, a mature, good composer, “I like the
orchestration very much, did you do it
yourself?” [laughter] And I said,
“Well, don’t you do yours?”
[laughter] And so there are these lingering
doubts. How can a woman orchestrate with
authority or imagination? But I was really taken
very seriously from the beginning by Henry Cowell
and the other people that I mentioned.
H. I would imagine that that had a lot to do
with your taking yourself seriously. It seems
that you never had any doubt about what you were
doing. You simply composed because you
composed.
F. Yes, yes, I suppose that was it.
H. What about being published, or being
performed? Any problem like that?
F. You mean, about, because I’m a woman?
Well, I began to be conscious of this aspect of
composing, not of composing, but of a
composer’s career, because I don’t
think it affected my composing, but my
career.
H. Right.
F. I began to be aware of this, in the last
ten, or twelve maybe fifteen years. And now I do
think that it’s, it must play a role, as it
plays a role in the rest of
society–can’t separate a composing
career from other kinds of careers. Of course,
more women are, there are more women, now,
composing. There’s often a kind of tokenism
associated with what they do for women.
There’ll be a series of concerts;
there’ll be one woman composer on it or
maybe two. Composing is a highly competitive
field, that is, getting performances is highly
competitive business. As long as you have men
running things, the likelihood of there being a
complete equality there is not entirely assured.
So I would say that this is a social problem.
Right now, because it’s Women’s
International Year, I get a lot of requests for
my music and for performances, almost all from
women, though, almost entirely from women. There
are some requests from “male
institutions,” but the surge of interest is
from women. And I’m very pleased about
that. I have my doubts about separate
organizations for women. I haven’t resolved
this in my mind.
H. What do you mean separate
organizations?
F. Well, someone I know, a composer, that I
know personally, I got a letter asking me to join
a league of women composers.
H. Oh, right.
F. Do you know about that?
H. I know of that, yes.
F. My reaction was, not so much negative
towards the organization, but I didn’t feel
inclined to join it myself. And perhaps
it’s just that I’m not joining at
this point, that I’m making my statement as
a composer and, because I happen to be a woman,
as a woman, as an individual now. I was active in
organizations like the Alliance for a long time.
Perhaps that’s it. But, there certainly is
a need for bringing these problems to the
surface. I was told that the Whitney Museum in
New York, which runs an annual American show,
raised its percentage of works by women from 6%
to 23% because of pressure by a feminist group of
women artists. Now, that kind of thing I think is
very good. Just, somehow I’m not into doing
that myself or joining with things of this
kind.
H. But you support that?
F. Oh yes, I certainly do. I certainly do.
It’s recognized that this is an area that
needs attention–when they begin to change
the juries a little bit, now, to include women;
juries having to do with awards or grants. And,
but this is part of a whole social climate that
affects men and women alike, affects all of us.
The ideal of equality of persons , is still
something we are going to have to work at.
H. Ah, that seems to be hard.
F. Yes! [laughter]
H. Let me see, did you know Claire Reis?
F. Yes..
H. Miriam Gideon?
F. Oh yes, Miriam is a very old and good
friend of mine.
H. Oh, wonderful.
F. Yes, we’ve been friends for a long,
long time. She was also a Sessions pupil. Our
thirty year friendship–a long time. And
Claire Reis, was the, as you know, President of
the League of Composers. That’s Claire Reis
you’re talking about?
H. Yes.
F. Well, yes, I would meet her in New York.
Works of mine were played by the League.
H. What about the Yaddo Festivals? What are
those?
F. Well, I don’t know how long they
continued. I took part, I think, it was the first
Yaddo Festival. It was Copland, was really
instrumental in organizing. And I played some
pieces of mine, Four Polyphonic Piano Pieces. And
I look back on them, they’re horrendously
difficult. I don’t know how I played them.
They continued, I think, for a while, maybe into
the ‘40s, to the early 40s. But I
didn’t have anything to do with them after
that first festival.
H. Oh, I see. In Massachusetts?
F. No, no. That was in Saratoga Springs at
Yaddo.
H. Oh, I had that all wrong. Let’s see,
do you have a lot of women students? Here at
Bennington?
F. Well, when I first came here, it was
entirely female. That was in 1964. And now, well,
it varies. The first year–I’m on
sabbatic leave now, so I have to think back to
last fall. My first year class consisted of, I
think, fourteen or fifteen women and one man.
Other classes, I can have more men in them,
sometimes even a preponderance of men. And I
hear, in the electronic music studio, most of the
students are men that sign up for these courses,
which says something. But we have talented women
at Bennington and I hope that the feeling of
composing is a natural thing for a woman to do,
will continue here. I think that was one of the
reasons they wanted to have a woman composer on
the staff. They’d never had one here
before, and I certainly think that this is very
important anywhere, to have a woman. Looking
back, I realize that it was of incalculable
importance that I had Ruth Crawford as a teacher
and as a model in my life. This is why it feels
natural to me to be a composer, totally natural.
And without that, I might have felt a little bit
like a fish out of water.
H. Did Ruth Crawford give you any words of
wisdom when you stopped studying with her, or
when you moved to New York, about holding your
own, apart from your art, just as a woman?
F. No, no. It was, she actually stopped, well,
she stopped composing entirely; I continued to
write. She went into, she married Charles Seeger,
as you know, and raised a family. She had four
children, and she got very involved in folk music
in Washington. She stopped writing the other kind
of music. And I also got married. I didn’t
have children until 1942. But it was a period of,
really quiescence about the woman question, or
whatever you want to–I’m doing a
piece now for orchestra and chorus which revolves
around the fourteenth amendment, which is very
interesting. Do you know about the fourteenth
amendment?
H. Does that have to do with the ERA?
F. No, no, no, that’s way
back–this is the time of the Civil War. At
the time of the Civil War, the, I just came upon
this reading casually, came upon this fact which
is known to any historian. After the Civil War
there was a split among the Abolitionists. They
wanted, the men wanted to give the black man the
vote, the freed black man the Vote, but they
refused to give it to the women. And the women
Abolitionists, like Elizabeth Cady Stanton and
Susan B. Anthony, all of them were outraged, that
after their work to free the Black man, they were
to be denied the vote, both black and white
women. This was an intensely passionate struggle.
And really a great moment of, in the period of,
in the period of suffrage–this was really a
heroic period. And I’m not a student of the
suffrage movement. But, certainly, in the time
when, we’re talking about, the ‘30s
and ‘40s, this was what was happening with
women, was not separated out, or people were not
aware of the subjection of women. They were very
much involved in some ways, in some ways that are
similar to the third world countries, with
economic problems. In the depression it would
have seemed comparatively unimportant, as I look
back on it. “Well, how are women being
treated?” when “How will I live, how
will I work, what to do about economic and social
inequities.” The black man’s
situation was much more in the forefront then.
There’s the lynching and terrible things
that were happening in the South. And in the
‘40s and ‘50s, after the war,
certainly there was a, very sort of blah period
about this. So, Ruth and I never spoke about
ourselves as women composers. I never thought of
myself as a woman composer and I wasn’t
referred to as a woman composer until fairly
recently, which certainly I don’t like. It
is because you don’t say men composers.
I’m a composer who happens to be a woman,
and some people think, in particular in England
and other countries, I think, I’m a man
because I spell my name with an ending in
“a-n.” So they think I’m a man.
So I don’t like this designation of woman
composer, at all.
H. It seems to me that there’s a line
drawn, or a line that gets confused between
women, in the business of the arts and women and
their creation of it.
F. Right, exactly.
H. It’s just a terrible line to be
confused, because it misses the point of a lot of
things.
F. Yes, yes.
H. To get back to your music, in particular,
“A Guide to the Life Expectancy of a
Rose.” That sounds wonderful. When did you
write that? Was that one of your early works?
F. No, I wrote that in 1956 and that was a
commission from the Bethsabee de Rothschild
Foundation in New York.
H. What exactly is that?
F. Well, it’s no longer an active
foundation. Bethsabee was a friend of mine and,
she’s of the French Rothschilds, and I got
to know her here. She now lives in Israel and
supports many things in Israel. And she asked me
to be the music director for her foundation here.
We gave a series of very fine concerts in New
York City. And the “Guide to the Life
Expectancy of a Rose” is the exact name of
an article that appeared in the New York Times
Garden Section. And the work is scored for, I
think, five instruments and a man and a woman
singer. It tells about the growing of roses, what
will live and what will die, and what has to be
pruned away. And this became a dialogue about the
relationship between this man and this woman,
expressed through this language of the growing of
roses.
H. Wonderful. That’s great. What other
works did you write for the concerts at the
Rothschild Foundation.
F. I wrote only one other work, which was a
work called “Valedictions” to
texts–poems by John Donne. It’s
scored for I think–I
forget–it’s mixed chorus, two
soloists and a small ensemble, about nine or ten
instruments. And that work has not been
subsequently performed again. It was performed in
New York.
H. You must have been reading the New York
Times and came across that article about the
rose. Did it strike you just then as an idea, or
how did you get an inspiration to write such a
song?
F. Well, I just loved the title; I just saw
it. I remember clipping it out. It seemed to me
so beautiful. “A Guide to the Life
Expectancy of a Rose”; it’s just
sheer poetry. And, of course, for something to
strike you, there has to be something cooking
inside yourself. And sometimes you’re not
aware of what’s cooking.
[End of Side a]
[Beginning of Side b]
H. Okay, as you were saying.
F. Yes. When I’m made aware that
something is taking place inside by the response
to something that one comes across on the
outside–
H. When you get ideas from external sources,
do they sort of lie around and germinate for a
while, or when you see something, do you know
exactly that “Ah yes,
that’s–I’m going to write a
piece.”
F. Well, it depends. Very often they will stay
around for a while and germinate or they will
become entirely transformed. This last piece that
I’ve written, just finished, the vocal and
string quartet piece that I told you
about–well, I knew, it was going to have to
do with something about time. I came across
the title of Anthony [indistinct], the English
novelist–a title for a series of books of
his, Dance to the Music of Time. I loved that.
Then, I got interested in time and I began
reading some things of Einstein that I could
understand and it was interesting– I knew
it was about time, but still I hadn’t found
anything. Then I read, began to find, I know
I’d looked into Blake, just looked into
Blake, maybe there was a volume of Blake around.
And finally, I was just going to, I had to write
this work. It was written under a grant from the
National Endowment and this work had to get
going! I knew I was ready to write it, but I
couldn’t find a text. One day I opened a
book of Zen Buddhist, on Zen Buddhism, and there
I found what I wanted. These are what are called
taisho or sermons, delivered by the master to the
disciples. And I have set six of these taisho and
they are really concerned with time and the
timeless, the relation of time to the timeless.
So I found what I wanted. Again, I had the
sensation of what I wanted, but it became
crystallized when I found–but it takes
active, for me, it takes active looking
sometimes, and other times, I just find
something. I found poems of Neruda and I began to
set them the very day I found them. One just lays
one’s hands, sometimes, on just what you
want, it depends.
H. You seem not to like labels, and I
don’t suppose anyone should, but you say
that you’re getting into words now, a lot.
Do you consider yourself an instrumental composer
or a vocal composer? Or have you ever thought
that way at all?
F. I wouldn’t like to. Well, I suppose I
shouldn’t be afraid of it. After all, Hugo
Wolf was a vocal composer, and Chopin was a piano
composer, and they’re great enough for
anyone. Actually, I’ve written a variety.
I’ve written a lot of music for theatre and
dance, which doesn’t use voice, and
I’ve written a Concertante for piano and
orchestra. And again, that’s an instrument,
and I’ve written a lot of chamber music,
that doesn’t need voice. So I really
couldn’t, I wouldn’t say that
I’ve written too much piano music lately. I
used to write a lot of piano music. But I wrote a
piece last year and I’ll probably write
more music for piano.
H. When do you expect to finish the work for
string quartet and eight voices?
F. That’s finished.
H. Oh, there should be a performance of
that?
F. I hope so, in New York next year and I hope
at Bennington. I’ll let you know.
H. O.K., that would be wonderful. Let’s
see, well, thanks very much for your time.
F. It’s been a pleasure, Frances.