Although 1939
was a busy year, Fine turned her attention again to the
oboe and wrote Sonatina for Oboe and Piano for
her oboist friend, Joseph Marx. The composition won a
prize in a contest sponsored by the Music Guild of
Philadelphia. The Sonatina is in three movements (fast,
slow, fast). The first movement is in a symmetrical
sonata design (first theme, second theme, development,
second theme, first theme); in the lyrical second
movement both the oboe and the piano exchange melodies
and accompanimental roles; and the lively third movement
features baroquelike figuration shared between both
instruments. Movement one’s beginning F major theme
sounds like a Scarlatti sonatina, and one would expect a
rather simple composition; however, the second theme
exhibits Fine’s penchant for doing the unexpected.
The tonal center is D Flat, meters change, and the piano
adds energetic figures above and below the oboe’s
melody. As the formal plan shows, more attention is given
to the second theme. It is transposed to G Flat,
fragmented in the short development, and is heard in F
major at the beginning of the recapitulation. When the
first themes returns near the end, it is decorated with
contrapuntal lines.
The second movement is a
ternary song form. In the beginning the oboe has C
Phrygian melody, which the piano accompanies in a
dissonant C major. The tonality changed for the B
section, and, instead of the previous bimodality, the
interest is in the contrapuntal lines that the piano adds
to the oboe melody.
The opening solo oboe
material of the last movement suggests a fughetta or
invention, but Fine created a binary shape of ABAB
through tonal relations in F minor, G major, C minor, and
G major, which eventually returns to the beginning F
tonality. This is the most tonal of her music and is a
striking contrast to the modernistic Solo for Oboe
composed ten years earlier; however, Fine demonstrated
that she could take simple tonal materials and manipulate
them so that the listener never knows what to expect. The
last A section has the beginning motif in C minor that
when combined with the descending oboe line creates the
dissonant interest found in her earlier music.
–Heidi Von Gunden,
The Music of Vivian Fine, Scarecrow Press,
1999