Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884-1920); USA

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884–1920) was born in Elmira, New York, and became one of the most original American composers of the early twentieth century. After early piano studies he traveled to Berlin in 1903, studying at the Stern Conservatory and privately with the composer Engelbert Humperdinck. Returning to the United States in 1907, Griffes accepted a position as director of music at the Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, where heavy teaching duties provided financial stability but limited his time for composition. Despite his short life—he died at thirty-five—his music attracted increasing attention in New York during his final years.

Griffes moved from an early German Romantic idiom toward a highly personal language influenced by French Impressionism, Asian music, and contemporary harmonic experimentation. His orchestral masterpiece The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, inspired by Coleridge, combines exotic color with sensuous orchestration. The Poem for Flute and Orchestra is admired for its concentrated lyricism, while the piano works Roman Sketches include the atmospheric The White Peacock. His Piano Sonata reveals a tougher, more abstract late style. Griffes’s synthesis of European modernism and an emerging American sensibility made him an important precursor to the generation that followed.

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Read biography at allmusic.com.