by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hello horn friends!
This month, I would like to introduce you to the music of prolific composer Vivian Fine (1913-2000). Fine studied composition under one of the founders of the modernist movement, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and was a member of Aaron Copland’s Young Composers Group with other major composers such as Bernard Herrmann.
Fine’s compositional style is a far cry from last month’s composer, Margaret Bonds; while Bonds firmly inhabited the realm of tonality, Fine’s often angular and dissonant works are more challenging on first listen but are fascinating studies of texture and contrapuntal writing. She composed well over 140 pieces of music, from orchestral pieces and operas to a variety of chamber works, several of which used the horn to great effect. Her 1991 work, Hymns, a substantial eight-minute chamber piece for two pianos, horn, and cello, is atmospheric, alternating moments of thick voicing with solo lines to create incredible colors. There’s an especially interesting moment in the second movement, “Toward the Distant Shore,” with unison cello, horn, and piano in the low register of all three instruments, while the second piano floats on top. (Visit her website to hear Hymns and other works.)
Fine also composed a woodwind quintet entitled Dancing Winds (1987), which musicologist Heidi Von Gunden described in The Music of Vivian Fine, “…the title is descriptive—the instruments express themselves as dancers and also relate to each other in dance-like fashion. The piece is in four sections, and the textures and tempi resemble a baroque dance format of slow, fast, slow, fast…. The slow first movement, “Andante molto,” features the quintet as a composite instrument, with long phrases created by different pairings amongst the group…. Although dissonance is present, it is not the focal point…. Counterpoints of spacious ascending and descending gestures, long phrases, and some exchange and reordering of material give the first section a graceful ballet-like character.”
Fine composed several other pieces for horn, including Songs and Arias (1990), a work for horn, violin, and cello commissioned by David Jolley, and Quartet for Brass (1978), both of which are well worth a listen or a performance!
