“Vivian Fine is a creator of music of fine substance and outstanding mastery....In her Concertante for Piano and Orchestra it is a delight to follow her diatonic flow. Even more impressive are her splendid songs—beautiful in emotional depth and a masterly mirroring of amazingly potent, fine intellect.”
     — Lazar Saminsky, Musical Courier, February 1, 1941, quoted in The Music of Vivian Fine by Heidi Von Gunden (Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 1999)

" You have so much within you! Let it grow and develop, and do not forget your old friend who believes in you and your great power of expression.”
     —Dane Rudhyar, letter to Fine, 1930.

“ the inner qualities [of Fine] are the same—natural technique and a rigid lack of compromise with anything but her very best.”
     —Henry Cowell, in “The Music of Vivian Fine,” by Wallingford Riegger, Bulletin of the American Composers Alliance, 8, no. 1 (1958).

“ ...Sometimes her music...has this marvelous inner quiet, where it just sort of rests and has this marvelous repose and long lines—and in a way that you don’t often encounter. It’s not the long-lined romantic gesture of the 19th century—it’s a kind of leaner mood, something I think is probably very American. If you think of images like the prairies out in the midwest, these immense expanses in our midwest, that kind of simple terrain.Then of course, by contrast, she writes this very lively active music...the shapes of the lines are to a large extent unpredictable....She’ll lull you into some kind of a preconception of what’s going to happen and, so to speak, pull the plug.”
     —Gunther Schuller, on radio program “A Tribute to Vivian Fine,” produced for NPR in 1986 by the International League of Women Composers.

“ Fine’s music is remarkably consistent. Though the 1944 Concertante for piano is milder, with clear hints of diatonicism, she has stuck fast to her original style, very successfully broadening its expressive and generic range, and suffusing it with a distinctive humour and considerable emotional force. She is a highly significant composer, original, unfailingly individual and wry, quite unlike anyone else.”
     —Bea Weir, in Contemporary Composers, Morton and Collins, Editors, (Chicago: St. James Press, 1992).


Vivian Fine Biography

A chronological list of works by Vivian Fine

A selected discography

Two published interviews with Vivian Fine