I was a bit daft in comparing Flagello to Fine. Thanks for not mentioning that. But what really separates Fine from Flagello, in my opinion, in not the twelve-tone part -- important as that was to Fine and his nervous contemporaries -- but the rhythmic part, for which we have no common label. Fine writes exploratory music using the nervous gestures we recognize from Austrian music in and after the period when the promise of European culture was dissolving under the pressures of the Great War and the cultural contradictions that led to it. Flagello, on the the other hand, writes music of nearly equivalent dissonance using the rhythmic and phrasing gestures we associate with the best music from 1880-1920.
Yes, Fine's music is of a decidedly neoclassical bent, although his beautiful
Serious Song for string orchestra is very much in the tradition of, say, RVW.
