SPOTLIGHT ON HISTORYSPOTLIGHT ON HISTORY
Charles Tomlinson Griffes
O
ne important composer of the World War I
era had little connection to the modern-
ist movement. W hen Charles Tomlinson
Griffes, the thirty-fi ve-year-old director of music
at the Hackley School for Boys, north of New York
City, died of an abscessed lung in 1920, he was only
beginning to become widely known as a composer.
Several of his compositions had been performed in
New York: in 1917 Sho-Jo (a stage pantomime) and
Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan for voice and
piano, and the following year a new piano sonata.
In 1919 The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan was played bythe Boston Symphony Orchestra, and the Notturno
für Orchester by the Philadelphia Orchestra. If his
older contemporary Charles Ives drew on the expe-
rience of a New England boyhood, Griffes’s outlook
was more cosmopolitan, as these titles suggest.
Though his career was cut short by early death, his
substantial body of work demonstrates that in his
lifetime a place existed in America’s musical culture
for a composer in the classical sphere whose work,
like Amy Beach’s (see chapter 8), was neither tied
to folk or popular music nor part of the modernist
movement.of dissonance and rhythmic complexity produced by Varèse’s ensemble of
nine wind players and seven percussionists. The title signaled the composer’s fasci-
nation with science (subsequent titles would include Octandre, Intégrales, Ionisation,
and Density 21.5), and Varèse saw himself—like Milton Babbitt and other composers
to be considered in Part 4—as something of a musical scientist, conducting research
into unexplored properties of music, or, as he preferred to call it, “organized sound.”
In Varèse’s compositions massive dissonant chords are used as blocks of
sound that are juxtaposed with other sounds, forming patterns and relationships
that have nothing to do with traditional notions of tonality, in which the tension
of dissonance resolves into the relaxation of consonance. Instead, Varèse’s atonal
music offers a listening experience that, though jarring, is also invigorating.
Unusual sonorities, punctuated by staccato blasts of unpitched percussion “noise”
and the whine of sirens, evoke urban modernity and effect a radical break with
the past. Thus Varèse aimed to “represent the true spirit of [his] times.”
Another Franco-American member of the International Composers’ Guild
was Dane Rudhyar. Rudhyar emigrated from Paris in 1916, just one year after
Varèse, and by 1920 had settled in California. He was a devotee of Theosophy, a
mystical movement founded in New York in the 1870s by the Russian-American
Helena Blavatsky that combined interest in Eastern religions with explorations
into the psychic and occult. Where Varèse looked to science for inspiration,
Rudhyar found in spiritualism a similar inspiration to create a highly dissonant,
nontraditional-sounding music. His piano composition Three Paeans (1927) “deals
with Energies,” he argued, “not with so-called Form.” In a series of articles, col-
lected into the books Dissonant Harmony (1928) and The New Sense of Sound (1930),
Rudhyar expressed his ideas about music’s effect on the soul, ideas that infl u-
enced a generation of modernist American composers and that much later
resurfaced in New Age music.
Of the native-born American ultramodernists, one of the most original was
Carl Ruggles. Ruggles was born in Massachusetts, conducted and taught briefl y inDane RudhyarCarl Ruggles172028_12_280-304_r3_ko.indd 282 23/01/13 8:40 PM