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FINDING HOME

Composer Michael Fine puckishly noted that the final movement of his Suite for Strings is about “finding C major—the people’s key,” and a contented traveler returning home. While this is the final resolution of the piece, “Finding Home” is more about the existential search

of the traveler—the composer, the musician, the listener—all of us as we travel through life. Home is not so much a place as a concept,
a feeling of trust that leads to belonging and comfort. This entire collection resonates
with processes of trust that ultimately, over a lifetime, build that sense of home, what Fine calls his “musical family.” Finding Home is thus the title and theme of this collection in that all of its pieces are tied together through relationships of musical-emotional identity: personal, public, friendship, love, politics, religion, and a largely undefinable quality of diaspora that ironically unites many sounds and musics under the title of what might
be called “Jewish music.” The preeminent musicologist Alexander Ringer considered this affective inheritance as a kind of “intonation” that resonated across individuals toward a deeper, shared “historical experience” (1990, 201). That Ringer was both a friend to Fine and a teacher to the current author is just one of the many connections in Finding Home.