Today we celebrate the birthday of American composer Vivian Fine, who was born in Chicago on this date in 1913.

Already, at the age of five, she was a scholarship piano student at the Chicago Musical College. As she grew up she became enthralled with the great composers and performers she heard at her regular visits to the Chicago Symphony. Vivian Fine initially intended to be a concert pianist, but theory studies with American composer Ruth Crawford Seeger inclined her more and more towards composition.

She also became an avid follower of the emerging “Ultra-Modern” school of composers, including Henry Cowell, who later proved to be one of her early mentors. Fine’s debut as a composer came in Chicago when she was 16, and at 17 she went to New York City, where she studied composition with Roger Sessions, and orchestration with George Szell.

Fine wrote this “Concertante for Piano and Orchestra” in 1944, initially without any specific commission or likelihood of performance. When her teacher Roger Sessions saw her sketches for this music, he commented: “Now we are colleagues.” For his part, George Szell, a musician notoriously hard to please, complimented her on its orchestration.

Teaching also became an important part of Fine's professional life, first at New York University and Juilliard, and ultimately at Bennington College. Vivian Fine died in March of 2000, at the age of 86, following a traffic accident in Vermont.