At age five, she won a scholarship to the Chicago Musical College and would eventually become the recipient of many more major musical awards and honors leading to a virtually uninterrupted career composing music until old age. Several of her compositions were funded through the National Endowment for the Arts, including her multidimensional Meeting for Equal Rights, 1866 for chorus and orchestra requiring three conductors. She also received an individual NEA grant for her opera Women in the Garden. She was elected to membership in the American Academy and Institute of Art and Letters in 1979 and she won a Guggenheim Fellowship for composition in 1980. Fine’s music achievements were honored by the San Francisco Symphony with their 1983 dedication of a “Vivian Fine Week” retrospective of her work. The Symphony also commissioned Fine’s massive Drama for Orchestra as part of this celebration, which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. In 1989, Boston mounted a similar celebration with their own “Vivian Fine Week” to celebrate the great composer’s music, during which Fine was also given the “keys to the city.”