The American composer Charles Griffes originally intended to become a concert pianist, studying in America and then at the Stern Conservatory in Berlin. From 1905 he devoted himself to composition, taking some lessons with Humperdinck, and continued instruction from his Conservatory teacher Gottfried Galston, while working as an accompanist and private teacher. Returning to the United States in 1907, he took employment as director of music at a school in New York, a position he retained until 1920. His first compositions were heard in 1909, as he continued to seek his own style, experimenting with varied techniques and including oriental influences. He wrote songs, chamber music and orchestral music, as well as stage works (largely during the last 10 years of his life).

Orchestral and Vocal Music

Griffes absorbed a certain oriental influence through people with whom he had contact in the later years of the second decade of the 20th century. One result of this was Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan, and in 1917 the orchestration of an earlier piano piece, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. In the same year he wrote Sho-Jo, described as a Japanese pantomime. Among his best-known art-songs are Three Poems of Fiona McLeod. In his final years he arranged some other earlier piano works for orchestra, including his Poem for Flute and Orchestra and Bacchanale, as well as the ballet The White Peacock.

Piano Music

Griffes’s earlier piano music is often programmatic in content, but by the time of his Piano Sonata of 1917–18 he had reached a more abstract and idiosyncratic style of writing, reflected succinctly in his Three Preludes of 1919.