Charles Tomlinson Griffes (Elmira, New York September 17, 1884 – April 8, 1920 in New York City} was an American composer. Elmira is a city located in Chemung County, New York, USA. As of the 2000 census, the city had a total population of 30,940. ... September 17 is the 260th day of the year (261st in leap years). ... 1884 (MDCCCLXXXIV) is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a leap year starting on Thursday of the 12-day-slower Julian calendar). ... April 8 is the 98th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (99th in leap years). ... 1920 (MCMXX) was a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar) // Events January January 7 - Forces of Russian White admiral Kolchak surrender in Krasnoyarsk. ... A composer is a person who writes music. ...

After early studies on piano and organ in his home town, he went to Berlin to study composition with Humperdinck. On returning to the U.S. in 1907 he began teaching at Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York, a post which he held for many years. A grand piano A piano is a keyboard instrument, which is widely used in western music for solo performance, chamber music, and accompaniment, and also as a convenient aid to composing and rehearsal. ... (help· info), IPA: , is the capital city as well as a state of Germany, and also the countrys largest city. ... Engelbert Humperdinck (September 1, 1854 – September 27, 1921) was a German composer, best known for his opera, Hänsel und Gretel (1893). ... 1907 (MCMVII) was a common year starting on Tuesday (see link for calendar) of the Gregorian calendar (or a common year starting on Wednesday of the 13-day-slower Julian calendar). ... Hackley School is a rigorous, traditional, private preparatory school located in Tarrytown, New York. ...

Griffes is the most famous American representative of musical Impressionism. He was fascinated by the exotic, mysterious sound of the French Impressionists, and was compositionally much influenced by them while he was in Europe. He also studied the work of contemporary Russian composers (for example Scriabin), whose influence is also apparent in his work, for example in his use of synthetic scales. The Impressionist movement in music is a movement in music loosely set between the late nineteenth century, up to the middle of the twentieth century. ... Alexander Nikolayevich Scriabin (Russian: Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Скря́бин, Aleksandr Nikolaevič Skrjabin; sometimes transliterated as Skryabin or Skrjabin) (6 January 1872–27 April 1915) was a Russian composer and pianist. ... In music, a scale is an unordered collection of notes or pitches, as opposed to a series of intervals, which is a musical mode. ...

His most famous works are the White Peacock, for piano (1915, orchestrated in 1919); his Piano Sonata (1917-18, revised 1919); a tone poem, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan, after the fragment by Coleridge (1912, revised in 1916), and the Poem for Flute and Orchestra (1918). He also wrote numerous programmatic pieces for piano, chamber ensembles, and for voice. The amount and quality of his music is impressive considering his short life and his full-time teaching job, and much of his music is still performed. A symphonic poem or tone poem is a piece of orchestral music in one movement in which some extra-musical programme provides a narrative or illustrative element. ... This page is about the nineteenth century English poet. ...

He died of influenza—possibly the infamous Spanish Flu—at the age of 35, and is buried in Bloomfield Cemetery, Essex County, New Jersey. Influenza, commonly known as the flu or the grippe, is a contagious disease of the upper airways and the lungs, caused by an RNA virus of the orthomyxoviridae family. ... The Spanish Flu Pandemic, also known as La Grippe Espagnole, or La Pesadilla, was an unusually severe and deadly strain of avian influenza, a viral infectious disease, that killed some 50 million to 100 million people worldwide over about a year in 1918 and 1919 [1]. It is thought to...

References and further reading

• Charles T Griffes, Edward Maisel. Alfred A Knopf, New York, 1943; revised 1984. ISBN 0-394-54081-6. This is the definitive biography of the composer and is widely available secondhand.

• The Concise Edition of Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, 8th ed. Revised by Nicolas Slonimsky. New York, Schirmer Books, 1993. ISBN 002872416X

External links

• Thomas Hampson: I Hear America Singing - Composer profile
• Art of the States: Charles Tomlinson Griffes