…a
humorous and clever setting of text from Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland….Previously
Fine had used other garden settings—A Guide to
the Life Expectancy of a Rose and The Women in
the Garden—and The Garden of Live
Flowers resembles both. Its cabaret style of piano
and a vocal trio (A Guide was a duet), unusual
text, and humorous situation are an obvious link to A
Guide….Like Women in the Garden, Fine
wrote quasi-declamatory vocal lines to ensure clarity,
paying careful attention to rhythmic inflections.
Generally the vocal lines are independent from the piano,
except at the beginning and end. The piano part is
especially clever.
The Garden begins
with a piano introduction of a strange two-voice
counterpoint. Even more unusual is the entrance of the
vocal trio in which the three repeat the introduction,
singing letters of the alphabet. Actually they are
spelling “This time she came upon a large flower
bed.” The same passage is repeated at the end of
the piece, in case the listener wants a second chance to
decode the message. However, this material becomes the
basis for the piano’s role, which does more than
just accompany the voices; it interprets and comments
upon the text, such as when the opening line of the left
hand is presented later as a single melody of trilled
pitches accompanying the text when the flowers tell Alice
they can talk. The same material is also reused in canon,
as rolled chords, inan ostinato figure, and in several
retrograde passages. This creative economy adds unity to
what could be a strange piece.
–Heidi Von Gunden,
The Music of Vivian Fine, Scarecrow Press,
1999