Download Charles Tomlinson Griffes: An Amepican Opiginal

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Charles Tomlinson Griffes: An Amepican Opiginal
Program Note by Donna Anderson
When Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born in Elmira, New York, on September
17, 1884, the musical world was either mourning or celebrating the death of
Richard Wagner, who had died the year before in Venice; Johannes Brahms was
alive and well in Vienna; Richard Strauss was twenty years old and beginning to
make 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 young
man of twenty-two who had just been awarded the Prix de Rome in France; and
Alexander Scriabin was a twelve-year old youth in Russia, already determined to
enter the Moscow Conservatory.
All these composers, and many others as well, have been held up by critics and
musicologists as having influenced the music of Charles Griffes at one time or another. And indeed, it is true that Griffes was at first influenced by the German Romantic tradition then moved toward Impressionism, then found a congenial source
of material in the music of the Orient as well as in the poetry of the Scottish-Celtic
writer
Fiona
Macleod,
then for one brief
Based on Indian Themes
turned
moment
to the music
in his
Sketches for String Quartet
of the American
Indian,
and finally
moved into the realm of absolute music and exhibited a stark, dissonant style
approaching atonality. This is remarkable when one remembers that Griffes' active
career as a composer spanned only some thirteen years (c. 1907-20). It is even more
remarkable that despite this eclecticism Griffes always retained his own musical
identity and was one of the first American composers composers of his generation to
ultimately break with the European tradition and find his own way out of the German-French orbit that dominated the American musical world before and during his
lifetime. It was Griffes' ability to assimilate the best around him and stamp it with
his own power of expression and individuality that mark him as a composer of true
originality 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 guided
and nurtured his taste in books and art. In the
summer of 1903, after he graduated from the
Elmira Free Academy, Charles Griffes boarded
an ocean liner for a journey that would carry
him to Berlin, where he would study until 1907.
Berlin in 1903 was one of Europe's largest
cities and one of the greatest music centers in the
world. Its musical life was dominated.by Richard
Strauss; it boasted several great music conservatories and two of the great opera houses of Europe,
the Berlin State Opera and the Municipal Opera.
Griffes enrolled at the Stern Conservatory of
Music, then directed by Gustav Hollander. While
in Berlin, he studied piano with Ernst Jedliczka
and, later, Gottfried Galston, composition with
Charles T.Griffes, May 1902 (age 18) Phillipe Rufer and Engelbert Humperdinck, and
theory and counterpoint with Max loewengard and Wilhelm Klatte.
For Griffes, the four years in Germany passed quickly. Events and peopleincluding 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 lessons
with Gottfried Galston, a young leschetizky pupil. Max loewengard left Berlin, and
Griffes continued his studies in theory and fugue with Professor Wilhelm Klatte, who
was also a music critic on a Berlin paper. In late 1905, Griffes left the conservatory
because he felt he would profit as much, if not more, from private lessons. Griffes
also felt the need to study composition with a teacher more modern than Rufer. In
1905, the possibility of studying with Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of
Hansel und Gretel, became a brief reality.
When Griffes returned to the United States in 1907, he became Director of
Music at Hackley School in Tarrytown, NY, a position he retained until his death in
1920. Griffes spent most of his free time during the school year composing and most
rs3
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of his ;summers and vacations in New York composing and promoting his music.
On his numerous trips to New York City, 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 years
il1)mediately following his return to the United States are strongly influenced by
German Romanticism. Beginning around 1911, Griffes abandoned the German
style and began experimenting with Impressionistic techniques. The works from this
period until around 1917 are generally highly colored, descriptive and pictorial, free
iQform, and employ whole-tone
scales, ostinato figures, parallelism, and other such Impressionistic devices.
In late 1916 and 1917,
Griffes composed voice-andpiano settings of five Oriental
poems, based on five-note and
six-note scales. The year 1917
saw several significant Griffes
premieres. Among these were
:~
Thl'ee Skefches fOI'Sfl'inq Qual'fef based on Indian Themes TRACKS
1-3
Sketch, TRACK 1: Unpublished. @ Donna K. Anderson. Edited by Constance E. Barrett)
Griffes composed five movements for string quartet, of which one is an early
student composition
from his German late-romantic
period (1908-10) and four are I
(First
the Kairnof Koridwen (TRACI<S
6c;12),composed 1916, a dance-
CharlesT.Griffes,a mature photo (Mishkin)
drama in two scenes scored for eight solo instruments.The piano Sonata (TRACKS4,5),
dated. December 1917-January 1918, is one of Griffes' greatest works, marking a
complete 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 that
included the first performance of an early version of Griffes' Two Sketches for String
Quartet Based on Indian Themes (TRACKS 1-3),the only composition in which Griffes
utilized Native Arner.ican melodies. The peak of Griffes' popular success came immediately 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"r
activity gradually subsided, but over the last fifty years his
music has gained a small but significant position in the orchestral and solo repertoire as well as in the teaching studio.
Charles 1. Griffes searched incessantly for a musical
language that would best express his own artistic personality. He was a self-made artist who was never decisively
shaped or permanently influenced by anyone person or any
single prevailing musical style. He was inspired and guided,
of course, but never artistically dominated. It can be said of
Griffes that his artistic credo was always uniquely his ownthe product of an uncommon mind and a noble spirit.
@ Donna K. Anderson
~
late works from his neoclassic period (1916-20). Only two movements of Griffes' late
period were published by G. Schirmer as Two Sketches for String Quartet based on
Indian Themes (TRACKS2, 3).Variousfactors such as the chronological ordering and
!j
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groupings of his four late quartet movements, Flonzaley Quartet first violinist Adolfo
Betti'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 Indian
Sketch from publication as well as Griffes' own decision to discard the Scherzo have
left a missing link for audiences interested in the American quartet literature of the
early twentieth century. The Two Sketches for String Quarteton Indian Themes,
originally published posthumously by G. Schirmer in 1921'is currently out of print.
i!!i511i!
This performance represents both the first New York performance of the complete
work and its first recording.
@ Constance E.Barrett, D.M.A.
Sonata
fop Piano
Considered
by many
TRACK
to be his masterwork,
Griffes'
Sonata
(composed
4-5
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. Schirmer, Inc., who became so captivated by it-hailing
it as superior in every respect
to "the other sonata" (the same one), and much more promising in its potential for
concert performance-that
they forthwith signed a contract, dated 1941, with the
Griffes estate to acquire what was already theirs.
Schirmer's embarrassment should remind us how richly complex and novel this
piece really is. All the same, its general form does not greatly depart from that of the
romantic sonata, except for omitting some repetitions. When Griffes gave the first
public performance in 1918, he was greeted with tremulous dithering about how
the music "breaks completely away from convention and belongs frankly to a field
of endeavor that must be called experimental." One critic listened to what had been
presented, and in the Christian Science Monitor wrote, "The work, though strange,
perhaps, to some hearers, proved to be clear in structure, intense in feeling, and
refined 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 in
1916. A recent critic points to specific passages in it matching specific passages in
such later works as Olivier Messaien's Quartet for the End of Time, a Poulenc
Sextet, the ending of Berg's Wozzeck, and Bela Bart6k's Sonata for two pianos
and percussion.
Kairn originated in a brief theater run as a dance-drama about a druid priestess
who, rather than escape with her warrior lover from the island sanctuary to which
she is pledged, remains faithful to her religious vows and stays behind to embrace
an 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 music
Kairn is not. Griffes called it a "continuous symphonic music in two movements or
scenes" and "concert music." The unique scoring, he hazarded, was "a combination
which I think has never been used by anybody." Incandescent, exhilaratingly original and singularly different from anything he wrote before or after it, Kairn stands
somewhere 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 out
in Griffes' sketchbooks dated 1917. Sakura-Sakura (TRACK
11) was written for Adolf
Bolm's Ballet-Intime. It was performed along with Griffes' Sho-Jo on August 5, 1917
in Atlantic City, New Jersey and soon after in Washington D.C. Tulle Lindahl was the
solo dancer in Sakura-Sakura. Griffes scored Sakura lightly for flute, clarinet, strings
and harp. The harmonies
emphasize
open fifths throughout.
Komori Uta
13) are si m ilarly scored and also emphasize
(TRACK
12) and Noge No Yama (TRACK
"non-western" sonorities, especially open fifths. Griffes' comments regarding his
philosophy about the use of Oriental music in Sho-Jo seem equally applicable to
(no viola),
his 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" rather
than "developed them in Indian style...My harmonization
is all in 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 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 copyright owner, Donna 1<'Anderson. All rights reserved. Griffes photographs provided
courtesy of Donna K. Anderson.
Recorded live in concert, Tuesday April 11, 1995, St. Paul's Chapel, Columbia
University
New York City.