Vivian Fine, at 13, was a composition student of the avant-garde composer Ruth Crawford. Fine became a teen protege of Henry Cowell, then she became a protege of Aaron Copland after she moved to New York City at 18. There she was active on the "new" Ultra-Modern music front as a composer and pianist. She was an excellent pianist and was an accompanist, as well as composer for the early Modern Dance movement with notables such as Doris Humphrey, Jose Limon and Martha Graham. Her early, youthful style was extremely dissonant; in the 1940s, under her teacher Roger Sessions, her music turned tonal, almost conventional; yet after this period she forever abandoned tonal structures and devised a mixed tonal/atonal "layering" style that continued until her last work, the opera, "Memoirs of Uliana Rooney," in 1994. "Drama for Orchestra," was runner-up for the Pulizer Prize, 1983; she won many awards; she was elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1979. In 2002 Greenwood Press published the first large-scale reference book on Fine’s life and compositions, "Vivian Fine: A Bio-Bibliography," by Judith Cody.

<peggykarp@earthlink.net> writes: In addition to Judith Cody’s book, there is another book on Vivian Fine that should be noted. It is "The Music of Vivian Fine" by Heidi Von Gunden, Scarecrow Press, Lanham, Maryland, and London, 1999. Von Gunden, a prominent American musicologist, has combined a lively biography with illuminating discussions of most of Fine’s compositions. There are numerous illustrations from Fine’s scores. A well-organized list of works completes this gem of a book. Essential reading for anyone interested in Fine’s music or American 20th century music.