American composer Charles Griffes' Piece for Piano in E Major was written in 1916, during which time Griffes was experimenting with Impressionism, Oriental scales and music, whole tones, and scales that he fabricated himself. However, the E Major Piece sounds mostly Impressionistic, with some German Romanticism present toward the end.

Griffes does a curious thing with many of his short piano pieces: He starts at the beginning very quietly, and as the notes register to the listener, one wonders whether he or she had missed something in the opening phrase. Griffes seems to start in the middle of a thought, and then goes on from there. But his endings are quite different. No matter how lush and Impressionistic the whole of the piece might be, within the last few measures, Griffes chooses German Romanticism, forte, block chords to abruptly end the piece. It seems a dichotomy that these two different styles would be pressed together into the same piece of music. In fact, sometimes, as in this piece, they really do not seem to go together at all, and the solid, conservative ending could be thought of as a letdown. Still, much of Griffes' music seems dichotomous and paradoxical, and so one should not be too surprised when Griffes mixes different genres within the same piece, even one as short as this (it is less than two-and-one-half minutes long).

Also, in the middle of the E Major Piece, Griffes chooses a theme from another piece that he had written that year, The Kairn of Koridwen, (which was written with a synthetic scale in mind), and thrusts that theme into this piece. The theme is from a part of scene 2 in Kairn, which is the love music. This theme starts on measure 17 of the E Major Piano Piece. Indeed, the middle of the piece does not seem to meld with the lushness of the beginning, nor the high runs toward the end. In all, Griffes' Piece for Piano in E Major is not constructed as well as some of his other works; but it is worth listening to, as it has some lyrical phrases, and in a sense gives one a short sampling of the different styles that Griffes had either used in the past or was working on at the time.

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