Ross Lee Finney, was born in Wells, Minnesota on December 23, 1906. Though Midwesterner in style and spirit throughout his life, Finney and his music would travel around the country and the world as a student, composer, and educator. After his mother and several important childhood influences formed the young Finney into a musician — and primarily a cellist — of certain aptitude, he would go on to become a grateful student of Alban Berg and Nadia
Boulanger. Despite his European studies, Finney remained a decidedly American composer and spent the bulk of his professional career as a professor: of music at Smith College from 1929 to1949 and as professor of composition and composer in residence at the University of Michigan from 1949 to 1973.
In 1930, Finney married Gretchen Ludke, an English scholar who often found creative ways to integrate musical ideas into her study of language and literature. Gretchen and Ross had two sons together. Though Finney had been composing steadily throughout his years as a student and young professional, he withheld these early compositions from publication and from anything besides academic performances. However, in 1927, his First String Quartet
won him a Pulitzer Prize. In the early 1930s, critical and professional attention to his music was unavoidable. The remainder of his career was then characterized by a constant struggle to sanction the time he felt he needed for a profession in composition, fending off various demands of academic positions and constricting commissions. From about 1933 until his death, Finney primarily considered himself a composer and his output was — excepting a hiatus during the WWII years while he served with the Office of Strategic Services overseas — steady and prolific.
Though he was hesitant to categorize his own or any composer’s output into “periods,” Finney did acknowledge three distinct phases in his artistic development: from folk idioms and circular patterns, to twelve-tone exploration, to a final focus on memory. However, a certain foundation in pattern and twelve-tone ideology stuck with the composer for the rest of his career following his studies with Alban Berg.
Unique to Finney’s acquisition of twelve-tone composition was his constant attachment to tonality. Finney always, in all phases of his development, considered his music tonal. Deeply inspired by medieval Italian repertoire, Finney defined tonality as “not a matter of triadic harmony but a matter of how the musical material functioned to give spatial shape to time.” This notion persisted even into his late explorations with twelve-tone-derived hexachords and serialization of musical form. Finney’s music theory was all his own and eventually mastered in his late career, beginning in the mid-1960s, at which point he also took an interest in opera, ballet, and early endeavors into electronic music: fostering a specific desire to use tape recording as a soloist or in chamber music.
Besides the Pulitzer Prize mentioned above, Finney was awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, one Rome Prize, and elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1962. Long into his “retirement” in 1974, which he planned to spend focused on his personal composition projects, he was constantly bombarded by commissions and requests to lecture at various academic institutions. In addition to composition, he was regarded as a specialist in American music and often spoke or taught courses on that topic. Finney died in his home on February 4, 1997 in Carmel, California at the age of 90. Still influential in modern composition and electronic music, his composition students include George Crumb as well as Roger Reynolds.
