Book provides insight on gifted composer's life
Irving Fine (1914-1962) may have been the most gifted American composer of his generation. He was born in Boston, brought up in Winthrop, educated at Harvard and at Tanglewood; he was one of the founding fathers of the music program at Brandeis University, which to this day sponsors an annual concert in his memory.
Fine was only 47 when he died. His last work, the ''Symphony (1962)," was probably his finest, summing up everything he had learned how to do; everyone felt it would be the springboard to a new era of accomplishment, but it was not to be.
Pendragon Press, in association with the Library of Congress, has published the first full-scale study of him, ''Irving Fine: An American Composer in His Time," by Phillip Ramey, a composer himself and for 13 seasons the program annotator for the New York Philharmonic. It is an intelligent, well-written book that ought to draw renewed attention to Fine's distinguished, elegant, and expressive body of work.
Fine's was a quiet, professional life, the life of a craftsman, and almost totally devoid of dramatic incident. One key episode was, however, very painful: his failure to win tenure at Harvard in 1948. Fine and many of his friends and classmates believed this happened because of strong anti-Semitic currents in the university and its music department at the time. And those who survived it are quite outspoken to this day about the issue and about such Harvard legends as the musicologist Tillman Merritt and composer Randall Thompson.
''[Thompson] was an official anti-Semite -- that I can vouch for," composer Milton Babbitt told Ramey, ''and a curmudgeon. Randall's anti-Semitism took a form so that he could easily have been a member of the Hitler Union."
Fine remained bitter about this rejection for the rest of his life, although his career at Brandeis, which began in 1950 and continued until his death, was successful, innovative, and influential.
Ramey writes analytically about each of Fine's works, both sympathetically and authoritatively, easily outshining the sometimes feeble newspaper reviews he quotes so fully. Fine's music impressed Stravinsky, Copland, Bernstein, and a host of others; Ramey makes you want to hear the music again, or experience it for the first time.
Fine's own lucid intelligence shines through the letters, lectures, and essays that Ramey quotes. In a forum at the Harvard Law School in 1956, for example, Fine remarked, ''The advent of the LP has increased the number of dead composers the contemporary composer must compete with. . . . [Composers] have always been aware of the cultural lag between themselves and their audiences. The truly creative artist is continually in advance of his audience -- no matter how enlightened it may be."
Ramey restricted his interviewing to people who knew Fine personally, so it is full of lively, candid voices, mostly fellow composers who speak their minds, including such eminent Bostonians as Harold Shapero, Leon Kirchner, and the late Arthur Berger. Speaking of Fine's wife, Berger said, ''I wondered how Irving could stand Verna, with that raucous voice." Ramey does discuss Fine's one documented affair, with the poet Irene Orgel, and tells a funny story about Fine in Vienna, trying to escape the renewed attentions of a chambermaid who, Shapero relates, ''had seduced him."
But for some reason Ramey doesn't repeat one of the most amusing stories about Fine, which his friend, Cambridge composer Daniel Pinkham, loves to relate. In 1947, music director Serge Koussevitzky invited Fine to play the piano part in Stravinsky's ''Symphony of Psalms" with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Fine was an accomplished pianist but was not a member of the musicians' union. He reported to the union hall for a sight-reading test, and a piano reduction of Suppe's ''Poet and Peasant" Overture was placed in front of him. He played it with bravura zest. The examiner said, ''I don't believe you were sight-reading." Fine replied that he had heard the piece before, but had never seen the printed music. ''OK, then," the examiner said. ''Play it again -- but this time, play it dreamy."
On the telephone earlier this week, Matczynski said he was relieved to be giving up all but his artistic duties. ''I feel I helped create a great monster in Emmanuel Music -- and a gigantic job, and I think it's time to give up some of that." Next year he will fill some of his new free time teaching viola and coaching chamber music at the Boston Conservatory.
