JAVS Spring 2025

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 at his home in Newton, Massachusetts. He was 94.

written by Elaine Fine

Donald McInnes (1939-2024)

McInnes built his career as a first-rate viola soloist with many solo appearances, including a performance of Berlioz’s Harold in Italy with Leonard Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic, a presentation still available on YouTube. With the advent of viola congresses came another public phenomenon for which he was infinitely qualified and meticulously well prepared, so prepared in fact that many of us who attended repeated sessions of him instructing young students before an audience came to consider Donald McInnes the Master of the Masterclass. McInnes was more than the sum of his parts when on stage—the same technical and musical excellence that so marked his performance skills became leavened and infused with entertainment, inspiration, and a genuine interest in students when applied to instruction. His preparation for teaching presentations was equally

Donald McInnes (1939-2024)

Donald McInnes, USC Thornton Professor Emeritus of Strings, has died at the age of 85. A violist of extraordinary artistry and a revered pedagogue, McInnes leaves behind a lasting legacy of performance, recording, and teaching that influenced generations of musicians worldwide.

Journal of the American Viola Society / Vol. 41, No. 1, Spring 2025

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