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Charles Tomlinson Griffes: An Amepican OpiginalProgram Note by Donna Anderson

When Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born in Elmira, New York, on September17, 1884, the musical world was either mourning or celebrating the death ofRichard Wagner, who had died the year before in Venice; Johannes Brahms wasalive and well in Vienna; Richard Strauss was twenty years old and beginning tomake a reputation in Germany; Arnold Schoenberg was a ten-year old in Vienna;Igor Stravinsky was a mere two years old in Russia; Claude Debussy was a youngman of twenty-two who had just been awarded the Prix de Rome in France; andAlexander Scriabin was a twelve-year old youth in Russia, already determined toenter the Moscow Conservatory.

All these composers, and many others as well, have been held up by critics andmusicologists as having influenced the music of Charles Griffes at one time or ano-ther. And indeed, it is true that Griffes was at first influenced by the German Ro-mantic tradition then moved toward Impressionism, then found a congenial sourceof material in the music of the Orient as well as in the poetry of the Scottish-Celticwriter Fiona Macleod, then for one brief moment in his Sketches for String QuartetBased on Indian Themes turned to the music of the American Indian, and finallymoved into the realm of absolute music and exhibited a stark, dissonant styleapproaching atonality. This is remarkable when one remembers that Griffes' activecareer as a composer spanned only some thirteen years (c. 1907-20). It is even moreremarkable that despite this eclecticism Griffes always retained his own musicalidentity and was one of the first American composers composers of his generation toultimately break with the European tradition and find his own way out of the Ger-man-French orbit that dominated the American musical world before and during hislifetime. It was Griffes' ability to assimilate the best around him and stamp it withhis own power of expression and individuality that mark him as a composer of trueoriginality and genius.

Griffes began his musical studies with his oldest sister, Katharine. About 1899,having exhausted her resources, he began to study piano with Katharine's teacher,Mary Selena Broughton, "Professor of Piano Playing" at Elmira College. In addition

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to the mechanics of piano playing, she guidedand nurtured his taste in books and art. In thesummer of 1903, after he graduated from theElmira Free Academy, Charles Griffes boardedan ocean liner for a journey that would carryhim to Berlin, where he would study until 1907.

Berlin in 1903 was one of Europe's largestcities and one of the greatest music centers in theworld. Its musical life was dominated.by RichardStrauss; it boasted several great music conservato-ries and two of the great opera houses of Europe,the Berlin State Opera and the Municipal Opera.Griffes enrolled at the Stern Conservatory ofMusic, then directed by Gustav Hollander. Whilein Berlin, he studied piano with Ernst Jedliczkaand, later, Gottfried Galston, composition with

Charles T.Griffes, May 1902 (age 18) Phillipe Rufer and Engelbert Humperdinck, andtheory and counterpoint with Max loewengard and Wilhelm Klatte.

For Griffes, the four years in Germany passed quickly. Events and people-including teachers-seemed to rush by, and always the student worked earnestly on.Ernst Jedliczka died in August 1904, and Griffes began to take private piano lessonswith Gottfried Galston, a young leschetizky pupil. Max loewengard left Berlin, andGriffes continued his studies in theory and fugue with Professor Wilhelm Klatte, whowas also a music critic on a Berlin paper. In late 1905, Griffes left the conservatorybecause he felt he would profit as much, if not more, from private lessons. Griffesalso felt the need to study composition with a teacher more modern than Rufer. In1905, the possibility of studying with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer ofHansel und Gretel, became a brief reality.

When Griffes returned to the United States in 1907, he became Director ofMusic at Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY, a position he retained until his death in1920. Griffes spent most of his free time during the school year composing and most

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of his ;summers and vacations in New York composing and promoting his music.On his numerous trips to New YorkCity, Griffes attended, as he had in Berlin,

m,yriad concerts, ballet, opera, and theater performances. He was a talented painter,'\;1dproduced delicately conceived etchings, drawings, and watercolors. He was.21S0interested in photography. From his earliest youth, Griffes showed an intense'Rersitivity to color, a trait that remained with him as a composer.

The works Griffes wrote as a student in Berlin and those written in the yearsil1)mediately following his return to the United States are strongly influenced byGerman Romanticism. Beginning around 1911, Griffes abandoned the Germanstyle and began experimenting with Impressionistic techniques. The works from thisperiod until around 1917 are generally highly colored, descriptive and pictorial, freeiQform, and employ whole-tonescales, ostinato figures, parallel-ism, and other such Impression-istic devices.

In late 1916 and 1917,Griffes composed voice-and-piano settings of five Orientalpoems, based on five-note andsix-note scales. The year 1917saw several significant Griffespremieres. Among these werethe Kairnof Koridwen (TRACI<S6c;12),composed 1916, a dance- CharlesT.Griffes,a maturephoto (Mishkin)drama in two scenes scored foreight solo instruments.The piano Sonata (TRACKS4,5),dated. December 1917-January 1918, is one of Griffes' greatest works, marking acomplete break from the style and approach of his earlier works. On April 2, 1919,the Modern Music Society of New York sponsored a concert of Griffes' music thatincluded the first performance of an early version of Griffes' Two Sketches for StringQuartet Basedon Indian Themes (TRACKS 1-3),the only composition in which Griffesutilized Native Arner.ican melodies. The peak of Griffes' popular success came im-mediately following the Boston Symphony's performance of The Pleasure-Dome of

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Kubla Khan, Pierre Monteux conducting in Boston on November 28 and 29, 1919,and in New York's Carnegie Hall on December 4 and 6.

Griffes' tragic early death in 1920-he was just thirty-five-brought an out- .pouring of tributes to the composer and to his music. Immediately following Griffei£death it seemed as though there were performances of his music everywhere. That"ractivity gradually subsided, but over the last fifty years hismusic has gained a small but significant position in the or-chestral and solo repertoire as well as in the teaching studio.

Charles 1. Griffes searched incessantly for a musicallanguage that would best express his own artistic personal-ity. He was a self-made artist who was never decisivelyshaped or permanently influenced by anyone person or anysingle prevailing musical style. He was inspired and guided,of course, but never artistically dominated. It can be said ofGriffes that his artistic credo was always uniquely his own-the product of an uncommon mind and a noble spirit.@ Donna K. Anderson

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Thl'ee Skefches fOI'Sfl'inq Qual'fef based on Indian Themes TRACKS1-3(First Sketch, TRACK 1: Unpublished. @ Donna K. Anderson. Edited by Constance E. Barrett)

Griffes composed five movements for string quartet, of which one is an earlystudent composition from his German late-romantic period (1908-10) and four are I

late works from his neoclassic period (1916-20). Only two movements of Griffes' lateperiod were published by G. Schirmer as Two Sketches for String Quartet based onIndian Themes (TRACKS2,3).Variousfactorssuch as the chronologicalordering andgroupings of his four late quartet movements, Flonzaley Quartet first violinist AdolfoBetti's suggested revisions and rewriting of the two published Indian Sketches/J.r1d G.Schirmer president Oscar G. Sonneck's editorial decision to withhold a third IndianSketch from publication as well as Griffes' own decision to discard the Scherzo haveleft a missing link for audiences interested in the American quartet literature of theearly twentieth century. The Two Sketches for String Quarteton Indian Themes,originally published posthumously by G. Schirmer in 1921'is currently out of print.

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This performance represents both the first New York performance of the completework and its first recording. @ Constance E.Barrett, D.M.A.

Sonata fop Piano TRACK 4-5

Considered by many to be his masterwork, Griffes' Sonata (composed 1917-18,

revised 1919) was published in 1921, shortly after his death. Twenty years later,someone sent a manuscript copy of the identical work to his publishers, G. Schir-mer, Inc., who became so captivated by it-hailing it as superior in every respectto "the other sonata" (the same one), and much more promising in its potential forconcert performance-that they forthwith signed a contract, dated 1941, with theGriffes estate to acquire what was already theirs.

Schirmer's embarrassment should remind us how richly complex and novel thispiece really is. All the same, its general form does not greatly depart from that of theromantic sonata, except for omitting some repetitions. When Griffes gave the firstpublic performance in 1918, he was greeted with tremulous dithering about howthe music "breaks completely away from convention and belongs frankly to a fieldof endeavor that must be called experimental." One critic listened to what had beenpresented, and in the Christian Science Monitor wrote, "The work, though strange,perhaps, to some hearers, proved to be clear in structure, intense in feeling, andrefined in expression."Today that judgment rings good as new. @ Edward Maisel

The Ka;pn of Kop;dwen: A Dpu;d Legend (Concert Version) TRACKS6-11"To break free and to do something big and new" was how Griffes described

what he did in his longest symphonic piece, The Ka;rn of Koridwen, composed in1916. A recent critic points to specific passages in it matching specific passages insuch later works as Olivier Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, a PoulencSextet, the ending of Berg's Wozzeck, and Bela Bart6k's Sonata for two pianosand percussion.

Kairn originated in a brief theater run as a dance-drama about a druid priestesswho, rather than escape with her warrior lover from the island sanctuary to whichshe is pledged, remains faithful to her religious vows and stays behind to embracean inescapable doom. The Celtic framework of this tale accounts for the title: Kairn

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means sanctuary, and Koridwen is the Goddess of the Moon. Chamber musicKairn is not. Griffes called it a "continuous symphonic music in two movements orscenes" and "concert music." The unique scoring, he hazarded, was "a combinationwhich I think has never been used by anybody." Incandescent, exhilaratingly ori-ginal and singularly different from anything he wrote before or after it, Kairn standssomewhere near the peak of Griffes' achievement. @ Edward Maisel

Thpee Japanese Melodies TRACKS11-13(arranged by Griffes) Unpublished. @ Donna K. Anderson

These three pieces are arrangements of Japanese melodies which were copied outin Griffes' sketchbooks dated 1917. Sakura-Sakura (TRACK11)was written for AdolfBolm's Ballet-Intime. It was performed along with Griffes' Sho-Jo on August 5, 1917in Atlantic City, New Jersey and soon after in Washington D.C. Tulle Lindahl was thesolo dancer in Sakura-Sakura. Griffes scored Sakura lightly for flute, clarinet, strings(no viola), and harp. The harmonies emphasize open fifths throughout. Komori Uta(TRACK12) and Noge No Yama (TRACK13) are sim ilarly scored and also emphasize"non-western" sonorities, especially open fifths. Griffes' comments regarding hisphilosophy about the use of Oriental music in Sho-Jo seem equally applicable tohis settings of these three melodies:

"It is developed Japanese music-I purposely do not use the term "idealized"...Cadman and others have taken American Indian themes and have "idealized" ratherthan "developed them in Indian style...My harmonization is all in octaves, fifths,fourths and seconds-consonant major thirds and sixths are omitted. The orchestra-

tion is as Japanese as possible: thin and delicate, and the muted string points d'orgueserve as a neutral-tinted background like the empty spaces in a Japanese print."

@ Donna K. Anderson

The unpublished Griffes compositions are recorded with the permission of the copy-right owner, Donna 1<'Anderson. All rights reserved. Griffes photographs providedcourtesy of Donna K. Anderson.

Recorded live in concert, Tuesday April 11, 1995, St. Paul's Chapel, ColumbiaUniversity New York City.