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