Survey
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
* Your assessment is very important for improving the workof artificial intelligence, which forms the content of this project
"'. 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 2 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 "" 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 4 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 1 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 6 ,,' 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.