Irving Fine, An American Composer in His Time
Phillip RAMEY: Irving Fine, An American Composer in His Time.
Pendragon Press ISBN 1-57647-116-0.
Reviewed by Leo Kraft (c) 2006
Irving Fine (1916-1962) was a gifted composer, an excellent pianist and a notable educator. His death at the age of 46 deprived us of an important creative talent; the fact that no serious book about him has appeared until recently is rather surprising. Philip Ramey’s book fills this gap admirably.
The book is divided into two large sections. The first takes Fine from his earliest days through his student years at Harvard and his four years as junior faculty member at that institution. The second section starts with Fine’s joining the faculty of the newly established Brandeis University, where he soon rose to the position of director of the School of Creative Arts.
While Mr. Ramey documents Fine’s activities in the usual way with reviews and letters, the strong point of the book lies in the direct quotations from those who knew him, providing diverse comments and information. In particular, the composer’s widow, Verna Fine, offers many insights into her husband’s personality and working habits. And the entire book begins with an introductory memoir by Richard Wernick, first a student and then a close friend of Fine. Wernick’s pages convey a personal view of his friend, and start the book in a way that is both informative and moving.
Part I of the book deals mostly with Fine’s upbringing and education. What emerges from these pages is a picture of a high-strung and very determined young man, committed to composition from an early age, and, being a Bostonian, resolved to attend Harvard University. In the course of time he became a junior faculty member there, and was hoping to receive tenure at the end of the five-year probationary period. The denial of tenure came as a blow which Fine remembered with bitterness all his life.
Mr. Ramey brings up the issue of anti-Semitism, both on the part of the Boston Brahmins and the Harvard music faculty, the two being not unrelated. There is little doubt that anti-Jewish discrimination was strong at Harvard — including in the Music Department where Randall Thompson may have been Fine’s chief opponent. In any case, Fine felt that tenure had been denied him because he was Jewish. How ironic, then, that the composers who became known as the Boston Six – Irving Fine, Lukas Foss, Harold Shapero, Arthur Berger, Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein—were all Jewish.
But, as Mr. Ramey implies, at Harvard, Fine was something of a square peg in a round hole. The entire orientation of the Harvard music faculty was toward scholarly pursuits. Musical performance was looked down upon as a lower-level activity, and composition was tolerated since Walter Piston kept his activities within a limited range and was rather unassertive as a faculty member. When the music faculty had to choose for a tenured position between an historian and a composer, they chose the historian. The composer was Irving Fine.
Among the most valuable pages in the first section of the book is Mr. Ramey’s brief summary of the role and importance of Nadia Boulanger. Although much has been written about that formidable lady, few have summarized her contribution as succinctly and accurately as this author. Irving Fine himself felt that Boulanger was his chief teacher.
The second section of the book deals more with Fine’s music and includes reviews, comments, and the author’s own evaluation of every work by Irving Fine. It depicts the composer as a highly self-conscious man given to periods of depression, which blocked him from composition. Mr. Ramey describes how Fine sought the help of a psychoanalyst, with results that were difficult to evaluate. That factor, plus the absorption in academic life that has distracted so many American composers from creative work, goes a long way to explain why a composer whose music was so well received managed to produce only a rather limited output.
What I had hoped to find in the book was some clue to Fine’s musical thinking in his complete change of direction from the language of neo-Classicism and Stravinsky to that of serialism. But there is nothing in Fine’s correspondence with Copland, his “father-figure,” or with anyone else, to offer any indication on that matter. However, the author does elicit from several sources the motivation for Fine’s change of orientation. The composer had begun to feel that his earlier works lacked depth, and that the way to achieve a more substantial kind of musical utterance was through serialism. His last works show him reconciling elements of neo-Classicism (diatonic) with serialism (chromatic).
It might be interesting to examine the way in which Fine began to use serial techniques, but that lies beyond the scope of Mr. Ramey’s book. All I could find was the chart, simply a layout of the 48 forms of the series, which could have been done by an undergraduate. Just how Fine utilized this chart in composition can only be ascertained by a close study of the score. Apparently he admired Aaron Copland’s Piano Quartet, the composer’s first venture into serial writing. However, that work is only marginally serial, as one can observe from the fact that the series consists entirely of whole steps, whereas the serious serialist is apt to devise an all-interval series to achieve maximum intervallic variety.
Mr. Ramey also gives the reader a good sense of Fine’s prose writing, both in program notes for his own compositions and from his lectures on a variety of musical subjects. The program notes are inclined to be somewhat formal and didactic, though quite informative. The range of Fine’s interests can be seen in two examples: during a stay in Paris he encountered the first instances of musique concrète, and even though he was not compositionally inclined toward that new development, he informed himself on the subject sufficiently to be able to give university lectures on that topic upon his return to the USA. His overview of six American composers, which Mr. Ramey skillfully summarizes, shows the scope of his interests and knowledge of the music of his contemporaries.
All in all, Mr. Ramey’s book not only gives a thorough picture of Irving Fine as a composer, but also locates him in the context of his time and place. Reading this book is an excellent preparation for listening to Fine’s music. There is much to be said about his music, but that will have to wait for another article.