Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born in Elmira on September 18, 1884, in a house which stood on the corner of Main and Gray Streets…

Griffes’ father, Wilber Gideon Griffes, was associated with a gentlemen’s furnishing business while his mother, Clara Louise Tomlinson, had been at one time a so-called “selective student” at Elmira College.

Not until the age of eleven did Griffes begin to study the piano seriously with his sister Katherine. By the time he was fifteen he had exhausted his sister’s resources as a teacher and began to study with her teacher, the “Professor of Piano Playing” at Elmira College, Mary Selena Broughton. Griffes graduated from the Elmira Free Academy in 1903. Miss Broughton had sufficient faith in his talents to help underwrite a period of study in Germany for Griffes.

Griffes spent four years in Berlin studying piano, theory, and composition. For the first two years he was enrolled at the Stern Conservatory where he had as piano teacher a former student of Nicholas Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. Griffes’ father died late in 1905 and when Griffes came back to Elmira in the summer of 1906 to visit his family, he gave a piano recital at Elmira College. The best known person with whom Griffes studied while in Berlin was undoubtedly Engelbert Humperdinck, the composer of the opera Hansel and Gretel, but Griffes had only a total of eleven lessons in composition with Humperdinck.

When Griffes returned permanently to the United States in 1907 he accepted a position as musical instructor at the well-known Hackley School in Tarrytown, New York. There he was to stay for the rest of his short life.

His four years in Berlin had revealed to Griffes that he would never have the technical dexterity necessary for performing in public on a large scale. Thus he dedicated himself to teaching and composing. In 1909 Griffes published five German songs, his first compositions in print. Slowly Griffes freed himself of the influences of his German schooling and began to compose songs to texts by Oscar Wilde, Sara Teasdale, and Sidney Lanier. Some of his most popular piano pieces date from the early period, 1910 to 1913.

In 1915 Griffes began what was to become his best known composition, “The White Peacock,” which had its first public performance the following year. It was published, along with three other works for the piano, under the collective title, Roman Sketches, Opus 7.

In Roman Sketches Griffes reached the high point in his preoccupation with Impressionism. In what is generally felt to be his greatest composition, the Piano Sonata composed in December-January, 1917-1918, Griffes found a voice unmistakably his own. It was performed for the first time by the composer in New York for the MacDowell Club on February 26, 1918, and although it was not well received by the critics, Rudolph Ganz did not hesitate to call it “the finest abstract work in American piano literature.”

Griffes’ last public appearance took place at Carnegie Hall on December 4, 1919, when the Boston Symphony conducted by the late Pierre Monteux, performed his symphonic tone-poem, “The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan,” which continues to be a favorite with symphony audiences today. But Griffes’ frail constitution was already exhausted by his incessant activities of teaching, composing and performing. He took to his bed at the Hackley School shortly after the performance at Carnegie Hall in December. On January 16 he was moved to the Loomis Sanatorium in Loomis, New York, where he died on April 8, 1920, of abscesses of the lungs which resulted from influenza. He was buried in Bloomfield, New Jersey, where his mother then lived.

As Griffes’ biographer wrote: “Charles Tomlinson Griffes, lost in the moment of fulfillment, nevertheless made his small but imperishable contribution to the music of the world.” One can also agree with Mr. Maisel that, with the possible exception of Charles Ives’ compositions, Griffes’ Piano Sonata was “the first major utterance in American music.” (From Charles Tomlinson Griffes at Elmira College: A Festival on the Eightieth Anniversary of his birth 1884-1964, 1964)