Mary Fineman has created a unique idiom, and it’s not easy to classify. Some listeners will hear the music of Carole King or Laura Nyro in Mary’s songs. Others will be reminded of Schubert or Sondheim. The strength of her music is that it can evoke any one of these, and it all works. Her piano playing is stunning, and her voice is beautiful - at times earthy, other times translucent. Her melodies and lyrics stay with you long after a song has ended.

In 2014, with the help of a grant from the James Irvine Foundation and the New Visions/New Vistas Commissioning Project, Mary composed an original orchestral score of four of her pieces. That song cycle, "It's About Love" was performed by the Oakland Symphony under the baton of Michael Morgan with vocalist Wesla Whitfield (and with Mary as surprise vocalist in a duo with Wesla). That music was performed again in 2024 with the Community Women’s Orchestra, featuring Mary as solo vocalist and pianist.

The path that led to Mary's writing for orchestra and performing was not straight forward. Originally from Baltimore, she trained as a classical pianist, studied music theory with Grace Newsom Cushman, and moved to Montreal to study piano with Philip Cohen and Lauretta Altman. In Montreal Mary taught at Concordia University and did jazz studies at McGill; she later taught at Temple Junior College in Texas. She worked as a freelance accompanist for instrumentalists and singers, and improvised for dancers for many years.

 The music life she'd had was about to change abruptly, though. In 2003, after visiting a gifted "energetic healer", an entirely new facet emerged. Mary suddenly began hearing her own music - music that had not existed before. And so she began composing out of the blue. (See Artist Statement to learn more).

Working on the music she was waking up with daily led, not surprisingly, to the desire to perform those works. And that meant pursuing vocal studies- the bulk of it popular music vocal work with Cary Sheldon, as well as classical studies with Marcelle Dronkers.

Mary soon began performing her own work. She has performed in the San Francisco Bay Area at the Paramount Theater with the Oakland Symphony, at Piedmont Piano Company, Chapel of the Chimes, Goat Hall, Hayward City Hall, Opera at the Nave, Center for New Music, and Community Music Center, as well as Steinway Piano and Grace Presbyterian Church with the Piano Composers of the Contra Costa Performing Arts Society. Her work has been heard on womenofsubstanceradio.com and classical station KDFC. She has performed at numerous fundraisers, private events, and house concerts in the US and Canada, as well as West Coast Songwriter events.

In 2022 she received first and third place prize for the Biennial Competition in Music, awarded by the National League of American Pen Women, (nlapw.org) of which she is a proud member. Recent ensemble compositions were selected for performance by the Menlo Brass Quintet, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OWVzn3_7eog through the National Association of Composers USA San Francisco branch (nacusasf.org), and for performance by a Pierrot Ensemble https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFa6lzbZ-IU Her work was chosen for inclusion in a solo piano concert through Ensemble For These Times, for 2023.

Mary is involved in the on-going recording of her more than seventy songs . Her CD’s include ‘Out of the Blue”, "Everyday Secrets", "Mary Fineman Solo Piano", and  "You and Me" . She is currently working on her first book of solo piano pieces. She resides in Oakland, California, where she maintains a private teaching studio.