Credo

I have a friend who calls herself a "sympathetic pantheist." My personal ethics and what may be deep-rooted genetic memories tend to align with ethics found in Judaism, but the idea of sympathetic pantheism is attractive to me too. I just have to work more at the "sympathetic" part.

My mother became a Christian when I was eleven. She grew up in a culturally Jewish but non-religious family. It was when my father would not join my mother in converting to Christianity that she decided to divorce him. My father was culturally Jewish but did not practice.

I imagine that there were other complications in their marriage, because marriage involves issues that are separate from a core belief system that determines your way of regulating your relationship to what happens in your life, and influences what you think will happen after you die.

My mother found community in Christianity, as well as a new partner. After my mother started going to church, my little brother and I started going to Saturday school at a reform temple. It was never about worship, and it didn't last long, but my we did learn the basics. I also learned, over the years, to love traditional Jewish music and the sound of biblical Hebrew.

My mother died in 2016, after having decades of support from her very liberal Episcopalian community, who valued her for her intelligence and wit. My brother died in a car accident in 2014, a few days after trying to connect with a Jewish community close to where our mother lived, and making peace with the pastor of our mother's congregation, who he had issues with in the past because of her sexual orientation. My father died almost two weeks ago at ninety-four under hospice care after a very long life.

During the mid 1979s when I was studying at Juilliard I had a Christian roommate who sometimes had prayer meetings in our apartment. She saw me as a person to convert. It messed with my mind. I spent far too much time resisting Christianity than I should have had to. Good thing my flute teacher, who was a secular Jew, was there for me to identify with.

In addition to the mid 1970s born again Christian presence that was everywhere, there were various cults popping up, like the Soka Gakkai "chant for what you want" kind of Buddahism, and the followers of Sun Myung Moon. Because I didn't want any future children of mine to be swept up in those movements (or cults), I decided in the mid 1970s that if I ever had children I would let them know that they had a Jewish identity and, if asked to, wouldn't need to follow another belief system. And I also knew that it would be best for them to be able to make up their own minds about whether they wanted to be religious.

That's what I did, and that's what they did.  

My father was not a practicing Jew. I choose to honor his memory for the things that he did that made me (make me) happy and made me (make me) proud of him.  While he was alive we shared many of the same musical beliefs, and we both embraced the idea of doubt when it came to religion. My credo has always been musical.

I live in a predominantly Christian area of Illinois, where many of the believing Christians I know here are very kind people (because they are very kind people). And I enjoy playing "holiday" music for them and with them. I enjoy the happiness that it brings to people (as music is wont to do), but the underlying local acceptance of the texts of the songs as history tends to bug me. It bugs me particularly when I witness it in the public schools. The inclusivity that schools in these parts once tried to incorporate into the winter holiday season has declined during the past few years. 

The holiday season has already started, and I approach it with my usual sense of dread. I'm happy to have musical work, and I'm happy to participate in musical events that make people happy (including religious services), but it is still something that I look forward to being over.

The Unknown Burton

I remember reading The Unknown Brahms by Robert Haven Schauffler shortly before Thanksgiving in 1979. It was in the Juilliard library, and I read it in one sitting. I remember the date and place because it was a very eventful couple of weeks (known to people who knew me then and there, but which I will not talk about here).

I realize that there are things that I would like to make known about my father, Burton Fine, that would otherwise never be known.

I'll begin with his musical adventures while in Chicago studying chemistry at IIT. As an avid chamber music player, he was well known in the Chicago musical community. At some point before 1952 he met Dieter Kober, who wanted to start a chamber orchestra. Dieter asked my father to be concertmaster, and my father agreed to play on the condition that Dieter study conducting. Some time later (maybe it was months, maybe it was years), Dieter gave my father a call to tell him that he had gone to Europe to study conducting. My father kept his part of the bargain and was the founding concertmaster of the Chicago Chamber Orchestra.

My mother, who Dieter knew from Chicago Musical College, played flute in the orchestra. Dieter thought that they would make a nice couple (they had met at Tanglewood in 1950), so he insisted on picking up each of them and driving them to rehearsals. According to my mother's sister Jeanne, they spent a lot of time in the back seat.

It was a surprise to me to learn that my father had a reading knowledge of Russian. German was the language that chemists around the world needed to understand before the beginning of the space race with the Soviet Union. Then it was Russian that chemists needed to be able to understand. I found out, during a conversation I had with my father about learning Russian in order to read writings by Catherine the Great, that one of the things my father did in the (pre)NASA lab in Cleveland was translate from Russian.

My father played a lot of chamber music when he was in Cleveland (my mother too). It was the Unitarian Church, which performed Bach Cantatas where he got his first real professional break. The story goes that Jerome Rosen, a violinist who later became a colleague in the Boston Symphony, had trouble getting up on Sunday mornings, so my father was called to take his place. The conductor was Robert Shaw. I believe that the first piece he played with Shaw was Bach Cantata 78, which happens to be the first Bach Cantata I learned (because the flute and tenor aria was the first one in the book I had of Bach Cantata arias). It is still my favorite.

I will probably add to this post in the future. Memory is like a funnel. There is only so much that can make it through the aperture at a given time.

But for why not link to the Internet Archive entry for one of his papers? Here's "Stability limits and burning velocities for some laminar and turbulent propane and hydrogen flames at reduced pressure". There's no way I can even wrap my head around the abstract:

The effect of reduced pressure on blowoff, flashback, and burning velocities of propane-oxygen-nitrogen burner flames was studied (oxygen fraction of oxidant, 0.5). The pressure exponent of burning velocity, 0.22, was nearly the same as for hydrogen-air flames; stability loops showed the same blowoff and flashback characteristics as were previously observed for hydrogen-air flames. In particular, for both systems, quenching distances determined as a function of pressure from the points of intersection of flashback and blowoff portions of stability loops were considerably higher than those obtained previously by a stopped-flow method.

Bruch Four Pieces, Opus 84

Here is a recording from a concert broadcast on the radio my father played with clarinetist Harold Wright and pianist Gil Kalish in 1974. It sensational chamber music playing.

You can listen here.

My Father

I would say that the Burton Fine (August 7, 1930 - November 15, 2024) I grew up knowing was a person of tremendous intelligence and tremendous integrity who expressed himself musically in the most elegant ways. He also had beautiful handwriting. It was fluid, unique, and elegant--unlike any handwriting I had or have ever seen.

My father was a puzzle to me when I was a child. He wasn’t at all like other fathers. I don’t remember him ever hugging me or ever telling me that he loved me. I do remember him singing “I want to hold your hand” when we would cross the street. He sang snippets of pieces of music occasionally, and made parody patter songs, which he sometimes sang for us at dinner, but otherwise I don’t remember him singing. But I do remember him practicing.

The greatest memories of my childhood were hearing him practice in the basement. What I remember most are solo Bach (Cello Suites and Sonatas and Partitas), Reger, Brahms (G major Violin Sonata on Viola), Franck (Violin Sonata), and Paganini Caprices. When he practiced he expressed love very freely. Love for the musical line (in any piece of music) is as real as any love from (or to) a human being to me. My mother, who met my father in 1950, married him in the early 1950s, and divorced him in the 1970s, expressed her love through her painting. She always did art, but became serious about it when she could no longer play the flute. My father didn’t think much of her artwork.

I know very little about either of my parents. Both were puzzles. Their first child, my brother Marshall, was not neurotypical. He, like my father, had a tremendous intellect, but neither of our parents, like most new parents in the 1950s, understood much about parenting. They did bring Marshall to Dr. Spock in Cleveland (my father’s first job was at the Cleveland-based government agency that was to become NASA), but anything regarding the autism spectrum, where Marshall self-identified as an adult, was unknown in the 1950s.

I came out neurotypical in 1959, and my younger brother Richard, born in 1961, came out really gifted in math and things related to the world of computers, where he has been working since he graduated from college. Marshall and I were compelled as teenagers and as adults to express ourselves musically by playing and writing music. Richard is happy as a choral singer and as an avid listener. Joshua, my half brother, who grew up in the 1980s is, like Marshall, not neurotypical, and he benefited (eventually) from an environment of understanding about the autism spectrum that has allowed him to thrive as a choral singer and as a responsibly employed person.

When Marshall, Richard, and I were children, our father did all the driving in the family. He did all the shopping and all the outings. Perhaps it was to take us off our mother’s hands for a while. I remember being almost five and going in a rowboat on Jamaica Pond in West Roxbury. It was shortly after my father joined the Boston Symphony as a violinist. The story goes that he saw an ad in International Musician one day, took the next day off to practice, flew to Boston, and won the audition. My mother didn’t think he would get the job, but she reluctantly left Cleveland when he did.

I didn’t know until much later that my father didn’t know how to swim when he took us boating. I do remember wearing (and enjoying wearing) life jackets, though. He also took us to the Boston Children’s Museum when it was in its infancy, and took us ice skating at Cleveland Circle. He immediately broke his ankle and had to drive to the hospital in incredible pain. (If I used the word "incredible" when describing something, he would snap at me. "It's very credible," he would say).

We used to go bowling too. And there was a time when we would try to play tennis.

My father taught Marshall to play the violin, and I remember that going bowling was used as a reward for his paying attention. Marshall did not like lessons with my father, who might not have liked to teach him either. But he learned from his father, Nathan Fine, who was, according to my father, as good as anyone in the Philadelphia Orchestra. Like proper Bostonians, we only played candlepins. Our mother never came to the bowling alley.

At seven I was big enough to play the half-size violin that we had. My father gave me an “A Tune A Day” book, and let me teach myself. Perhaps he didn’t want to mess things up for me like he had for Marshall. Richard had no interest in the violin, but he got to have piano lessons, and he became a really good pianist. I became an autodidact.

Our father used to bring me and my brothers to the Tanglewood grounds during open rehearsals on Saturdays in the summers, and eventually we used to go to the concerts on Sundays. Through exposure to the Boston Symphony throughout my childhood I got to hear a lot of really great music. And as a teenager I was pretty much on my own, and I would go to Tanglewood to hear student concerts. Never having the opportunity to be anything other than independent, I enjoyed a great deal of freedom as a young person. If (when) I got in trouble I never told my parents about it. And they never asked.

The Burton I grew up with had a very difficult time telling anything but the truth, or what he felt to be the truth. I imagine it might have gotten him in trouble if he shared his feelings with his colleagues in the Boston Symphony, so he kept pretty much to himself. He read a lot, and knew a great deal about history.

I remember going to a party with him after a concert that was hosted by some very rich people who acted like they were superior to everyone else. I mentioned that I didn’t feel comfortable around those people, and he said that they were people who supported the orchestra, and that we needed to be nice to them. His eventually married someone from a “donor” class family, and grew to be comfortable with it. I prefer to remember my father as a member of the intellectual working class.

When I returned to string playing in my early thirties and I had an instrument in hand, I was able to communicate with my father in his language, and I finally was able to recognize that were cut from the same cloth. When I had the opportunity to play chamber music with him (he came to Illinois to play concerts three or four times), it was always a wonderful experience. He was a truly great musician.

I sometimes hear shadows of the familiar sounds I heard in childhood when I practice. And when I see my hands and arms behaving the way I observed my father’s hands and arms behaving, I feel like he is a part of me, and that best part of him is with me to carry on in music making.

I used to write CD reviews for the American Record Guide, and my father read all my reviews. He would call to talk about the recordings. I loved those phone calls. He would also give me solutions to problems I had with difficult passages in the viola parts I played in orchestra, which I would share with my section-mates. And he would listen to recordings I made of the recitals I played. Some of them must have been painful for him to hear because my development as a violinist and as a violist in adulthood was slow.

A note from Marshall, an excerpt from his memoir.

. . . This was before my father, Burton Fine, was a research chemist with NASA, having gotten his Ph.D. in chemistry from IIT. After leaving Cleveland, he would serve as principal violist of the BSO for 29 years before being demoted in 1993; and he retired on New Year’s Eve 2004.

I know a fair bit about what he did as a chemist. Many years ago I read his dissertation, The Solubility of Iodine in Benzene/Carbon Tetrachloride Solutions. It does not sound to me like the work of a rocket scientist; but at the time I read it I could neither know, nor care about, nor even comprehend its practical aspects. I have not seen it since; it must be misplaced in his own house, or hidden. As a rocket scientist, he might have been involved with the Gemini Project. I believe it was classified and remains so, which means I will never know. He wrote 18 papers, mostly for a journal called Combustion and Flame, which I located at the chemistry library at Yale at the time I unsuccessfully auditioned for their music school in 1977. Strangely, the shortest of these--a critical letter to the editor in 1961--became the most widely quoted. Almost every subsequent article would refer to it, freely.

Musically, though, he is a mystery. What I know of his early years is awfully sketchy. He won a composition prize at age nine in his hometown of Philadelphia, where his ancestor, Joseph Fine (1877-1976) came to escape the pogroms of Nicholas III. His prizewinning piece, a cradle song, was orchestrated and performed by the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski. Yet I have been unable to find so much as a mention of it.

At age thirteen he applied to study composition with Menotti and was turned down. It seems he had also been playing violin at the same time; he had several years study with Ivan Galamian, and his father (my grandfather) Nathan (1907-1985) was also an excellent amateur violinist. Anyway he turned there. At some point--for how many summers I don’t know, but it must have been several--he attended Galamian’s camp at Meadowmount. That was probably how he became acquainted with the viola, for it is well known that Galamian would hire a cellist to work in string quartets with three violinists at a time, one of whom would obviously have to play viola. Later he attended Tanglewood (1950) and Red Fox (1954 or so). Despite this musical excellence, he majored in chemistry instead of music while he attended Penn. Why, I’m not sure. Perhaps Grandpa might have told him that music was best left an amateur sidelight. Which is why he wound up in Chicago as a doctoral student in chemistry at the time he married Mom.

My father, Burton Fine, died last night at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 94.

The Last Waltz

Unfortunately there will be no last Harris Waltz. The dance is over. The lights that made the future look bright and good have been turned out. The hall is empty.

We don't know what the building will be used for next, and we don't want to imagine the dark possibilities.

At least I don't.

My only solace is that we have two months of constitutional democracy, impaired as it is by the Supreme Court and the House of Representatives. Maybe there are republicans in Congress who will help put some guardrails in place. But clearly misogyny and racism will continue to bubble beneath the surface of the smiling faces we see on the street.

Harris ran a great campaign. She is a brilliant person and a good person. She would have made a great president. And she could have made a difference. I mourn for the kind of a country she would have helped us become.

Harris Walz IV "Electoral"