Montana violinist found refuge writing music during COVID
Tim Fain travels constantly, playing violin as a featured soloist with big orchestras or friends like the composer Philip Glass. Or in Hollywood, where he records film and television soundtracks like "Black Swan" and "Succession."
When the pandemic hit, though, his concerts and performances got canceled.
So Fain hunkered down at home in Hamilton, where he's lived for some 15 years, with his wife Tasha, a violinist with the Missoula Symphony Orchestra, and their children.
The pause gave Fain more time to focus on his own compositions, one of which will have a home-state premiere this weekend with the MSO.
"So you can imagine, all of a sudden, I had a lot of time on my hands, and I really worked on this piece, 'Edge of a Dream,'" " he said in a phone interview. As he wrote, he found the music came "out of a sense of really wanting to find some positive direction or a sense of hope."
This time of year, he hopes it can help since "it's important to really get ourselves into that mindset, because then we can actually get there."
Fain, naturally, is the featured soloist on the 23-minute work. Elsewhere on the program, audiences will hear the MSO perform Valerie Coleman's "Umoja: Anthem of Unity." The Washington Post named her one of the top 35 women composers. And finally, Brahms' Symphony No. 1, which is nicknamed "Beethoven's 10th" and builds on the older composer's innovations, Tai said.
If you go
The Missoula Symphony Orchestra with Tim Fain will perform the latest Masterworks concert this weekend at the Dennison Theatre. For tickets, go to missoualsymphony.org .
Fain performed with the MSO last year on guest composer Pascal Le Boeuf's Triple Concerto for Violin, Percussion Duo and Orchestra, after the planned soloist had to cancel at the last minute. Tai said Fain learned the difficult piece in a handful of days and she was struck by his heartfelt, virtuoso playing.
In this new piece, she hears the influence of minimalism, including Philip Glass, with repeated patterns and beautiful harmony. It showcases the violin in a way that reminds her of Samuel Barber.
Fain said he wanted the piece to feel representative of the time, to "bottle that moment, in a way," but what he ended up hearing in his head felt more optimistic despite sections of tension and darkness.
While he was writing, he thought frequently about Barber and Sibelius' Violin Concerto, which was the last concert piece he performed before COVID. Beyond that, though, he also felt that the isolation of the time period meant he didn't really feel locked in. While he wouldn't wish for anything like that to happen again, it did feel formative, as though he was "revealing — not chipping away, at my own style and my own voice."
After this weekend, he has more performances of the piece lined out and hopes to record it in 2026.
More of his own compositions are under way as well, including an orchestral work based on extreme weather. He's a student and admirer of Vivaldi, Glass, Max Richter and others who've written about the seasons, and he's exploring ways to introduce the human element.
"Any account of seasons these days should certainly take into account our role, as far as the direction, the future of weather and seasons more broadly, and what even the idea of seasons means, how that's evolving going forward as we enter a period of instability as far as weather and climate go," he said.
Valerie Coleman, 'Umoja: Anthem of Unity'
This piece, named after the Swahili word for unity and built on call and response structure with singable melodies, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra and marked the first time the orchestra had played a piece by a living Black female composer, according to Coleman's website.
Tai said it's structured on a folk song-like phrase that's initiated by one instrument and then gets repeated around the ensemble, reflecting the meaning of the title phrase.
"It's also another piece of our time that could really evoke the unity of how we could come together. Even though there are some distances, even though there's some kind of disruptions in the middle of the piece, by the end, we all come together," she said.
Brahms Symphony No. 1
The Masterworks selection is by a composer who took almost 20 years to complete his first symphony.
Tai said Brahms was anointed as the next Beethoven when he was in his 20s, based on his works for chamber ensembles, piano and voice. "He feels such pressure on his shoulders" that he was hesitant to start, she said.
The first symphony does bear the influence of his predecessor, including homages to Beethoven's Fifth and Ninth. She said it has grand moments along with intimate and beautiful ones that signaled the arrival of a major composer.
"You see a lot of similarity in terms of the groundwork — the building blocks that Brahms is using — but he has his own harmonic language that's uniquely his, and it's very much more complex and romantic and advanced," Tai said.
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