http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/02/arts/music/celebrating-the-works-of-irving-fine-born-100-years-ago.html 2014-11-02 05:53:00 Celebrating the Works of Irving Fine, Born 100 Years Ago On the 100th anniversary of the composer Irving Fine’s birth, American Neo-Classical music will be back on some concert programs. === Soon after arriving at Harvard as a freshman in 1947, the composer Martin Boykan stumbled upon a choir rehearsal. “I sat and listened to them, and it was very clear to me that it was by Stravinsky,” he recalled in a telephone interview. “It was Stravinsky’s style, and I thought it was absolutely wonderful. The music was just really great. Stravinsky was absolutely the best.” But Mr. Boykan made a crucial error. “It was not by Stravinsky,” he admitted. “It was by Irving Fine.” Fine, a composer teaching at Harvard, was conducting his own choral works. Mr. Boykan’s mistake was not unusual: For a generation of American composers, Stravinsky truly was the best. American modernists at midcentury — from established composers like Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson to young lions like Harold Shapero and Fine himself — hewed closely to Stravinsky’s Neo-Classical style, a revival of 18th-century values perfected in the 1920s. To mistake a Boston composer for the Russian master was an enormous compliment, but also a tacit acknowledgment of American music’s debt to European developments. Dec. 3 will be the 100th anniversary of Fine’s birth, an opportunity to reassess that Neo-Classical moment in American culture. For several decades, Fine and his colleagues had a confirmed place in the elite institutions of classical music. But today, those midcentury composers are often faulted for drawing on Old World mannerisms, overlooked in favor of mavericks like Charles Ives and John Cage. Aside from a handful of Copland chestnuts, few works of American Neo-Classicism are regularly heard in our concert halls. A bonanza of Fine centennial activities in New York and Washington may rectify this imbalance. On Nov. 16, The events are sponsored by the Fine’s own repertory is relatively small. He completed only a few dozen works in his career, cut short by his death in 1962. He was 47. The output is varied, with impish anthems for the Harvard Glee Club, tender songs and intricate chamber music. Stravinsky’s shadow invariably hovers. “Stravinsky used to refer to him as ‘my son,’ which didn’t make life easy for him, I don’t think,” Mr. Boykan said with a laugh. “This was a very powerful personality.” That personality was mediated by a crucial individual: the revered pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. A Stravinsky devotee, Boulanger taught nearly every Neo-Classicist. Fine met Boulanger when she visited Cambridge, Mass., in 1939 and followed her back to France to study in her composition class, absorbing rigorous lessons in counterpoint and harmony and engaging with Stravinsky’s music. When war interrupted his studies, Fine returned to the United States and settled at Harvard. Stravinsky visited soon after, and Fine shepherded him around campus. He forged close alliances with older Stravinsky supporters like Copland and the conductor Serge Koussevitzky, as well as Leonard Bernstein, still in his 20s. With Koussevitzky at the helm of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Bernstein a rising star, Neo-Classicism occupied the center of musical life. Koussevitzky conducted the 1948 premiere of Fine’s bright and brassy The approach matched Fine’s artistic temperament. Mr. Boykan said that Fine had told him “he got involved very much in the Neo-Classic Stravinsky because that seemed like the music which was really the most deeply concerned with music, was not concerned with the public, was the most serious.” Fine’s cohort became known as the Boston School, a kind of sequel to what Thomson nicknamed the Stravinsky “was very fond of what he called the Boston Boys,” Ms. Geller added. “Stravinsky was my husband’s hero.” Shapero and Fine also became academic colleagues. After failing to receive tenure at Harvard — possibly because of anti-Semitism — Fine found a place at Brandeis, established in 1948 as a haven for Jewish intellectuals. He built the school’s music program from scratch, seeking out friends like Shapero and Bernstein, whose opera “Trouble in Tahiti” had its premiere at one of Brandeis’s renowned arts festivals. And Fine hired Mr. Boykan, today an emeritus professor. “There is no question that he was the architect of the department,” Mr. Boykan said. Fine’s arrival at Brandeis coincided with a broader musical shift. In the early 1950s, the paternal spirit of American composition began to drift from Stravinsky toward Schoenberg. Even before Stravinsky himself converted to Schoenberg’s 12-tone method of composition, Fine began writing serial music. Terse chamber works like his But Fine continued down a winding musical path, never forsaking tonality. His best-known work, the 1955 That a figure like Fine carefully navigated Neo-Classicism and serialism, the twin specters of European modernism, is no indictment of American composers’ originality. Instead, it demonstrates how a sagacious musician could create his own style through the syntax of others. There is no absence of imagination here, just that age-old phenomenon, an artist adopting a language from precursors, tinkering and improving rather than overthrowing. That gift is evident in his final composition, the 1962 The great tragedy of the Symphony, though, is that it is a transitional work. Days after conducting the Boston Symphony in one of its early performances, Fine died after a heart attack. There had been plans for an expansive choral piece and a violin concerto. Copland wrote, “It is saddening to think that Fine was not fated to carry through to full fruition the new directions clearly inherent in the best pages of the Symphony.” In the final movement of Fine’s Symphony, a skittish passage in the strings distinctly echoes the slashing chords of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.” Making reference to an early work from his spiritual guide, Fine was perhaps refashioning himself as an enfant terrible, an unlikely role for a composer so steeped in the music of the previous generation. “He was really moving into something else, something personal, something quite wonderful,” Mr. Boykan said. “He was finding his own voice.”