The Life and Works of Charles Tomlinson Griffes

Charles T. Griffes (1884-1920) was born into an exciting time in history-twenty years after the end of the American Civil War and thirty years before World War I. He saw the inventions of the first car (1885), the first box camera (1885) and the first airplane (1903). America was in the height of its Industrial Revolution. Monet had refined his technique by the mid-1880's and had bought the land containing the now famous lily pond in his paintings; Picasso was four years old. Claude Debussy and Richard Strauss were in their twenties and had begun their careers, while Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky and Alexander Scriabin were mere children. Griffes had many influential contemporaries, but he created his own unique style. Besides his works being part of the standard repertoire of singers, pianists and flutists, he was important as a transitional figure between New Englanders such as Paine or MacDowell and the Copland generation (Guentner 124).

Griffes was born in Elmira, New York to a middle-class family. He began studying piano at an early age with his sister Katherine, but by 1899, he had advanced enough to study with Katherine's teacher, Mary Selena Broughton. It was Broughton who nurtured his talent and suggested he go to Germany to study music. In 1903, with financial support from Mary Broughton, Griffes went to the Stern Conservatory in Berlin to prepare for a career as a concert pianist.

Soon after he arrived in Germany in 1903, he wrote to his mother, "It is rather discouraging at first to find so many pupils in the conservatory who can play just as well and lots better than you can" (qtd. in Griffes, Four GermanSongs). Despite his discouragement at the beginning of his schooling, Griffes's time at the conservatory was quite successful. He performed as a soloist with the conservatory orchestra in 1904, an honor almost never given to first year students. However, Griffes gradually drifted away from his dreams of becoming a concert pianist to becoming a composer. In 1905 he left the conservatory, despite Mary Broughton's disapproval, to study composition privately with Engelbert Humperdinck.

In 1907, Griffes returned to the United States, where he became the music director at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. While there were disadvantages to this job, such as teaching "boring boys," as Griffes described them, to play the piano, he had a positive outlook on his chosen profession. His position at Hackley provided him with a steady source of income, which was needed partly because he was supporting his sister and widowed mother. On one occasion, he said, "I don't believe in the 'starving in the garret' type of artist. I could not do good work if I had a constant struggle with poverty" (Bauer 363). The close proximity of the Hackley School to New York City was also advantageous for Griffes. He once wrote, "And I long to be in the city. The country does not inspire me especially; perhaps I take it too much for granted. I get much more inspiration from reading Oriental folk tales than I do from looking at a tree! At this season of the year I can hardly wait for school to be over so that I can get to New York for the summer. I love the skyscrapers and the pavements" (Bauer 356).

While teaching at Hackley, he spent his free time composing, and during the summers he composed and promoted his music in New York City. His greatness as a composer "is reflected in the fact that although his creative career covered only 13 years he produced a surprising number of important works" (Anderson Grove 287). These works included piano, chamber, and orchestral music, songs and stage works. His first compositions were piano pieces, and while in Germany, he wrote the Symphonische Phantasie for orchestra and several of his German songs. While these songs are quite beautiful and an asset to musical literature, they were more the result of his studies than his own musical expression (Tawa 145).

After returning to the United States in 1907, Griffes's composition style was conservative and highly Germanic. He later grew as a composer and created a distinctive style by becoming more adventuresome. During the last three years of his life, he began using broader resources including non-triadic harmonies, creative scale patterns and more linear motion within his pieces. His work shows influences of Ravel, Debussy, Scriabin and Stravinsky. In response to the claim that his work shows signs of being changed because of exposure to music of his contemporaries, Griffes explained, "One cannot possibly play the new composers much without being influenced by them in one's own compositions. But I do have a deathly fear of becoming one of the dull imitators of the innovators. There are already enough of those" (Maisel xii).

Griffes composed using a variety of musical forms. Some pieces are in ternary form, fantasy form or in a mirror arrangement. He rarely used Sonata-Allegro or abstract forms. Most of his works are songs, and these songs are chiefly through- composed. The songs can be categorized in three groups: German lied, French songs and American songs, although there is some ambiguity about the German lied because they do not fit easily into American or German genres (Moore 8).

It is difficult to classify Charles Griffes in the world music scene. Some have argued that he was an American Impressionist, but he actually went through several phases as composer. He can easily be seen as a transitional musical figure. The pieces written between 1911 and 1917 certainly reflect musical Impressionism, with free forms, parallel chords, ostinato figures across the bar-lines and whole tone scales (Anderson Grove 287). During the next two years, he makes use of Oriental devices in pieces like Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan, op. 10 and Sho-jo. In a 1917 The New Music and Church Review article, Griffes describes this music:
"It is developed Japanese music-I purposely do not use the term 'idealized' . . . Others have taken American Indian themes and have 'idealized' rather than 'developed' them in Indian style . . . My harmonization is in all octaves, fifths, fourths and seconds-consonant major thirds and sixths are omitted. The orchestration is as Japanese as possible: thin and delicate, and the muted string points d'orgue serve as neutral-tinted background like the empty spaces in Japanese print" (Griffes, Four German Songs).

After this two year phase, he entered his mature phase, which comprised the last three years of his life. Pieces from these last years were often dissonant and used unique melodic shapes.

Charles Griffes died on April 8, 1920, after having suffered illness since the beginning of December 1919. He had been diagnosed with tuberculosis, but it was later discovered that he died of complications associated with influenza. Griffes struggled throughout his life to gain recognition as a composer, but "following his death, performances of his music seemed to be everywhere" (Anderson Griffes 174). A chamber group was even named after him in 1920.

Although Charles Griffes lived a short life, dying at age 35, his compositional output was relatively large and influential in the progression of American art music. "In America, where other composers were making a tremendous effort to create a national music, Griffes took the stance of a composer devoted to the cultivation of an art not beholden to any national idiom" (Tawa 142). His fame as a composer has continued to the present as orchestras, chamber ensembles and solo players continue to perform his music.

Bibliography

Anderson, Donna K. Charles T. Griffes: A Life in Music. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993.

---. "Charles T. Griffes." The Grove Dictionary of American Music. Ed. H. Wiley Hitchcock and Stanley Sadie. 4 vols. New York: Macmillan, 1986.

Bauer, Marion. "Charles T. Griffes as I Remember Him." Musical Quarterly 29 (1943) 355-80.

Chase, Gilbert. America's Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987.

Griffes, Charles Tomlinson. Collected Works for Piano. Denver Oldham, piano. Liner notes by Donna K. Anderson. New World Records, 80310-2, 1997.

---. Four German Songs, Four Impressions, Song of the Dagger, The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, Op. 8, Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod, Op. 11 and Three Tone-Pictures. Cond. Seiji Ozawa. Boston Symphony Orch. Liner notes by Edward Maisel. New World Records, NW 273-2, 1976.

Guentner, Francis J. "Reassessing a Recital Heritage." College Music Symposium 17.2 (Fall 1977) 124-30.

Hamm, Charles. Music in the New World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1983.

Hitchcock, H. Wiley. Music in the United States. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1988.

Maiser, Edward. Charles T. Griffes: The Life of an American Composer. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984.

Moore, John V. and David Reeves. "The Published German Songs of Charles T. Griffes." National Association of Teachers Singing Bulletin 41.2 (November -December 1984): 7-12.

Tawa, Nicholas E. Mainstream Music of Early Twentieth Century America: The Composers, Their Times and Their Works. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1992.