>> From the Library of
Congress in Washington D.C.
>> What we're going to be doing
today is a workshop and performance
of the Fantasia for
string trio of Irving Fine.
Irving Fine, who died
50 years ago in 1962,
we are observing the 50th
anniversary of his death,
which is very close to the
100th anniversary of his birth,
which will take place in 2014.
And we want to present
an important work of his.
All his works are important.
But we want to present
a late important work.
And I selected this one because it
made what I consider a significant
breakthrough in the combination
of using a kind of Schoenberg
and twelfth tone technique and
very neoclassical principles
that were derived from Stravinsky.
Irving Fine was my principle
composition teacher and mentor
when I was an undergraduate
at Brandeis.
In the early to mid-50s he
became an extremely close friend.
My family and his family
were very close friends.
And it's especially
gratifying to be here
that many years later
being able to do this.
And not just being able to do it
but being able to do it with a group
of very young dedicated people.
It gives me a lot of hope
for the future to work
with a half a dozen teenagers who
not only take their work seriously,
but who clearly have come to
understand what this piece is about
and what this music is about.
How other music relates
to this music.
And so in that regard, I want
to thank Christian Tremblay
from Peabody Institute.
And the Peabody Institute itself for
loaning us these wonderful players.
Thank you.
Irving Fine was a very important
composer in the, from the late 40s,
particularly through the 1950s,
and into the very early 1960s.
He left Harvard University and
went to Brandeis University.
He was invited by the
President of Brandeis University
to establish a school,
not just of music,
but a school of creative arts.
Which included music.
It included painting, poetry,
sculptor, theater, dance.
And what he accomplished
was quite remarkable.
Now, Fine was a neoclassical
composer, which meant that the kind
of music he wrote was
based on principles
from the late 18th century.
As distilled through a
modern musical mentality,
mainly Stravinsky and
then Aaron Copland.
But as the years went by,
he got more and more curious
about what the so-called Second
Viennese School was doing,
Schoenberg, Webern, Berg,
working with 12 tones,
which the neoclassical
people did not.
They worked with more
conventional harmonies.
One of the things that Irving wanted
to do badly was expand
the harmonic pallet
of his music while not abandoning
the elegance and the kind
of narrative that you
get from classical music.
Classical four bar, five
bar, seven bar phrases.
He was not interested in what was
the more angular type of music
that you find in Schoenberg
or in Webern.
Nor in the kind of
supercharged romantic music
that you find in Berg.
So he tried to make
an accommodation.
And the way he did this
was to take the principle
of 12 tone music, which
was very simple.
That was in order to
make every pitch equal
so that no pitch is
predominated over other pitches,
you took all 12 tones of the
chromatic scale, and you put them
in some kind of reasonable order.
You figured out a clever
order to put them in.
And then the idea was
you never repeated a tone
until all 12 had been sounded.
Now, there's hardly a piece
of 12 tone music in which
that holds completely true
from beginning to end.
But what Fine did was try to take
that method and apply it to a music
that had the elegance
that he was interested in.
And so what we're going to do
when we do each of these sections,
the three sections, the two slow
sections and the fast section,
the [inaudible] is I'll talk a bit
about the organization of the piece
and have you play some
parts that are extracted
from each of your movements.
And then we'll start to put the
piece back together so to speak
and come up, if we can,
with a complete movement.
And we'll do this for
each of the movements.
>> This has been a presentation
of the Library of Congress.
Visit us at loc.gov.