* Vivian Fine; Composer of Ballet Scores, Operas

Vivian Fine, 86, a composer who wrote ballet scores for Jose Limon and Martha Graham. Fine was a prodigy who entered the Chicago Musical College when she was 5. She later studied piano with Abby Whiteside and composition with Roger Sessions. She was known for a stern, dissonant style, which in later years became less forbidding and more expressive, even humorous. For several years she was a composer and accompanist for modern dance groups. Among her ballet scores were “The Race of Life” for Doris Humphrey, “Opus 51” for Charles Weidman and “Tragic Exodus” for Hanya Holm. Later she wrote “Alcestis,” a ballet suite for Graham, who danced the title role at its premiere in 1960, and “My Son, My Enemy” for Limon. A feminist, Fine also composed an opera called “The Women in the Garden,” which included a colloquy among Virginia Woolf, Isadora Duncan, Gertrude Stein and Emily Dickinson. Fine’s last major work, in 1994, was a partly autobiographical multimedia opera with a libretto by Sonya Friedman called “The Memoirs of Uliana Rooney.” Fine was an advocate of American music who helped found the American Composers Alliance in 1938 and served as its vice president from 1961 to 1965. A resident of Hoosick Falls, N.Y., she died Monday at Southern Vermont Medical Center in Bennington after an auto accident.