Charles Griffes

For more information on Charles Tomlinson Griffes, visit Britannica.com.

(b Elmira, ny, 17 Sept 1884; d New York, 8 April 1920). American composer. He studied with Mary Selena Broughton in Elmira and with Humperdinck in Berlin, where he lived, 1903-7. He returned to teach in Tarrytown, NY. Up to c 1911 his music was within the German Romantic tradition but he then developed a more Debussian style in piano pieces (The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, 1912; Roman Sketches, 1915 - 16) and songs (Tone-images, 1912 - 14; Four Impressions, 1912-16). He became closely concerned with oriental culture (Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan, 1916 - 17; ballet Sho-jo, 1917), while his last works, including the Piano Sonata (1918), show a free handling of dissonance paralleling Skryabin.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920) was one of the most important American composers at the beginning of the 20th century.

Charles Griffes was born in Elmira, New York, on September 17, 1884. He began his musical studies with his sister Katharine, who gave him his first piano lessons. In about 1899 he completed his piano education under Mary Selena Broughton, a professor at Elmira College. In 1903 she financed Griffes' musical stay in Berlin, where he studied piano with Ernst Jedliczka and Gottfried Gaston, composition with Engelbert Humperdinck and Philipp Rufer, and counterpoint with Wilhelm Klatte and Max Lowengard, all at the Stern Conservatory. A brilliant piano student, Charles Griffes nevertheless felt more attracted to composition. Thus he decided to leave the Stern Conservatory in September 1905 to study privately with Humperdinck.

When he returned to the United States in September 1907 he had already composed several songs and a Symphonische Phantasie for orchestra. At that time, Griffes became director of the music department of Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. He kept this post until he died in 1920. An excellent teacher, Griffes was held in high esteem by his colleagues. He spent most of his free time composing and promoting his work each summer in New York City. He died at the age of 35 while he was working on a drama, Salut au Monde, based on texts of Walt Whitman. In November 1964 Elmira College held a Griffes festival to commemorate his 80th birthday.

Griffes' music reflected his eclecticism, as it revealed first German, then French and Oriental, influences before becoming more abstract. His works parallel the musical eclecticism of the Polish composer Karol Szymanowski. It is probably fair to describe Griffes' work as pre-eminent American compositions of the 20th century. Throughout his life he kept in touch with famous composers such as Feruccio Busoni and Sergei Prokofiev. He also maintained relations with American composers as revealed in his diary. Writing in this journal, he says: "At 4 [o'clock], Varèse and I came up to Laura's [Mrs. Elliot] where I played the Pantomine [The Kairn of Koridwen], [Charles] Cooper, [Henry] Cowell were there. Varèse turned [pages] for me and was much interested."

Griffes first began to write music in Berlin, where he was in contact with several German composers. He wrote at that time the songs for voice and piano based on German texts and utilizing a musical language profoundly influenced by Brahms and Richard Strauss. After 1911 Griffes' music included more elements borrowed from the French impressionists; their timbre, their free structures, and their composers' preference for descriptive pieces (see Three Tone Pictures and Roman Sketches). The Three Poems (1916) reveal a more experimental language, incorporating a lot of dissonances within the framework of a free tonality.

In 1916 Griffes became involved with Orientalism, preceding a similar interest on the part of such American composers as Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and John Cage. After Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan (1916-1917), Charles Griffes wrote Sho-Jo (1917-1919) for Le Ballet Intime and the Japanese dancer Michio Ito. (Le Ballet Intime was directed by Adolf Bolm, ex-dancer at Les Ballets Russes. ) This piece achieved several Oriental effects through delicate orchestration. In 1917 Griffes wrote a colorful orchestral version of his most successful Oriental work, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. It was probably through French music (for example, Debussy, St-Saëns) that Charles Griffes became attracted to Orientalism.

In his last works, Charles Griffes tended to use a more abstract and structured musical style whose language became deeply complex. His Sonata for piano in three movements (1917-1918) and his Three Preludes for piano, Griffes' last completed work, clearly revealed this new turn in his music. The Three Preludes showed several similarities to Schoenberg's Sechs Kleine Klavierstücke.

Further Reading

E. M. Maisel, Charles T. Griffes: The Life of an American Composer (1943, 1984); D. K. Anderson, The Works of Charles T. Griffes: A Descriptive Catalogue (1966); and D. Boda, The Music of Charles Griffes (Dissertation, Florida State University, 1962) are major sources of information on Charles Griffes and his work.

Additional Sources

Anderson, Donna K., Charles T. Griffes: a life in music, Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

Maisel, Edward, Charles T. Griffes, the life of an American composer, New York: Knopf: Distributed by Random House, 1984.

Similar Artists:

Claude Debussy, Frederick Delius, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco

Influenced By:

Engelbert Humperdinck

• Born: September 17, 1884, Elmira, NY
• Died: April 08, 1920, New York, NY
• Genres: Classical

Biography

Charles Griffes
Born	September 17, 1884(1884-09-17), Elmira, New York
Died	April 8, 1920 (aged 35), New York City
Occupations	Composer
Instruments	Piano, voice
Years active	1910–1919

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (Elmira, New York, September 17, 1884 – New York City, April 8, 1920) was an American composer for piano, chamber ensembles and for voice.

Contents 1 Musical career 2 Personal life 3 Footnotes 4 References and further reading 5 External links

Musical career

After early studies on piano and organ in his home town, he went to Berlin for four years to study composition with Engelbert Humperdinck at the Stern conservatory. On returning to the U.S. in 1907 he began teaching at the Hackley School for boys in Tarrytown, New York, a post which he held until his early death 13 years later.

Charles Griffes CD

Griffes is the most famous American representative of musical Impressionism. He was fascinated by the exotic, mysterious sound of the French Impressionists, and was compositionally much influenced by them while he was in Europe. He also studied the work of contemporary Russian composers (for example Scriabin), whose influence is also apparent in his work, for example in his use of synthetic scales.

His most famous works are the White Peacock, for piano (1915, orchestrated in 1919); his Piano Sonata (1917–18, revised 1919); a tone poem, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, after the fragment by Coleridge (1912, revised in 1916), and Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). He also wrote numerous programmatic pieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and for voice. The amount and quality of his music is impressive considering his short life and his full-time teaching job, and much of his music is still performed. His unpublished Sho-jo (1917), a one-act pantomimic drama based on Japanese themes, is one of the earliest works by an American composer to show direct inspiration from the music of Japan.

Personal life

He died of influenza at the age of 35 and is buried in Bloomfield Cemetery in Bloomfield, Essex County, New Jersey.^[1] His papers passed to his younger sister Marguerite who chose to destroy many that explicitly related to his gay life.^[2] Donna Anderson (see below) is his current literary executor.

Griffes kept meticulous diaries, some in German, which chronicled his musical accomplishments from 1907 to 1919, and also dealt honestly with his homosexual lifestyle including his regular patronage of the Lafayette Place Baths and the Produce Exchange Baths. ^[1][3]

Charles Tomlinson Griffes was drawn into the gay world by the baths not just because he had sex there, but because he met men there who helped him find apartments and otherwise make his way through the city, who appreciated his music, who gave him new insights into his character, and who became his good friends. The gay world became a central part of his everyday world, even though he kept it hidden from his nongay associates.

– George Chauncey, Gay New York 1995

During his time as a student in Berlin he was devoted to his "special friend" Emil Joèl (aka "Konrad Wölcke"). In later life he had a long term relationship with John Meyer (biographer Edward Maisel used the pseudonym Dan C. Martin), a married New York policeman.^[2]

His surname is properly pronounced GRIFF-iss, though it is sometimes mispronounced in the French manner as "Greef."

Footnotes

1. ^ ^{a b} "Grave for Charles Tomlinson". findagrave.com. http://www.findagrave.com/cgi-bin/fg.cgi?page=gr&GRid=20131&pt=Charles%20Tomlinson%20Griffes. Retrieved 2006-12-22. 
2. ^ ^{a b} Dynes, Wayne (1990). Encyclopedia of Homosexuality. St. James Press. pp. 506. ISBN 1-55862-147-4. 
3. ^ "GLBTQ Encyclopedia entry for Charles Griffes". GLBTQ. http://www.glbtq.com/arts/griffes_ct.html. Retrieved 2006-12-22. 

References and further reading

• Maisel, Edward (1984). Charles Griffes. Knopf. ISBN 0-394-54081-6.  The definitive biography of the composer and is widely available secondhand
• Anderson, Donna K. (1993). Charles T Griffes (Smithsonian Studies of American Musicians). Smithsonian Press. pp. 272 pages. ISBN 1560981911. 
• Slonimsky, Nicolas (1993). The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians. Schirmer Books. pp. 2624 Pages. ISBN 002872416X. 
• Chauncey, George (1995). Gay New York: Gender, Urban Culture, and the Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. Basic Books; Reprint edition. pp. 496 pages. ISBN 0465026214. 

External links

• Charles Griffes at the Open Directory Project
• Free scores by Charles Griffes in the International Music Score Library Project
• Free scores by Charles Griffes in the Choral Public Domain Library (ChoralWiki)
• Charles Tomlinson Griffes scores (the composer's manuscripts) in the Music Division of The New York Public Library for the Performing Arts.
• Thomas Hampson: I Hear America Singing - Composer profile
• Art of the States: Charles Tomlinson Griffes
• [1]. American Musicological Society Newsletter Essay by Howard Pollack

Persondata
NAME	Griffes, Charles Tomlinson
ALTERNATIVE NAMES
SHORT DESCRIPTION	American composer
DATE OF BIRTH	17 September 1884
PLACE OF BIRTH	Elmira, New York
DATE OF DEATH	8 April 1920
PLACE OF DEATH	New York City

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