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 is a leap year starting on Tuesday (click on link to calendar). ... April 8 is the 98th day of the year in the Gregorian calendar (99th in leap years). ... 1920 is 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. This article is about the modern musical instrument. ...   Berlin? (pronounced: , German ) is the capital of Germany and its largest city, with 3,426,000 inhabitants (as of January 2005); down from 4. ... Engelbert Humperdinck (September 1, 1854 – September 27, 1921) was a German composer, best known for his opera, Hänsel und Gretel (1893). ...

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 (Алекса́ндр Никола́евич Скря́бин; sometimes transliterated as Skryabin or Skrjabin) (January 6, 1872 – April 27, 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. ... Samuel Taylor Coleridge, English poet, 1795 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (October 21, 1772 – July 25, 1834) was an English poet, critic, and philosopher who was, along with his friend William Wordsworth, one of the founders of the Romantic Movement in England and as one of the Lake Poets. ...

He died of influenza—possibly the infamous Spanish Flu—at the age of 35, and is buried in Bloomfield Cemetery, Essex County, New Jersey. Negatively stained flu virions. ... The Spanish Flu Pandemic, also known as the Great Influenza Pandemic, the 1918 Flu Epidemic, and La Grippe, was an unusually severe and deadly strain of influenza, a viral infectious disease, that killed some 25 million to 50 million people world-wide in 1918 and 1919. ...

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