The Pastoral in Charles Griffes’s Music: Aesthetic of Ambivalence

At the turn of the century, visionary composer Charles Tomlinson Griffes synthesized highly diverse elements from other musical traditions into his distinct artistic voice.

As American as he was far ranging in his interests, Griffes was an aesthetic polyglot, combining elements of literature, visual arts, global folk melodies, and contemporary European art music into a new musical language. The breadth of his sources of inspiration are breathtaking, including the sensual harmonies of fin-de-siècle French music, the British Aesthetic Movement, folk music drawn from the Middle East and Java, and a wide range of poets, including William Blake, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Sharp. The Pastoral in Charles Griffes’s Music explores both his music and the rich historical context from which it grew to enrich our understanding of the composer’s artistic contribution and reveal new intersections and contradictions in European and American culture during the early twentieth century. Taylor A. Greer also critiques the philosophical foundation of topic theory and its relationship to the pastoral in Griffes’s music to reflect on the end of the nineteenth century and clarify our understanding of his artistic influences.

With Griffes’s conception of the pastoral, he transformed the siciliana-based tradition he inherited from the eighteenth century into a new and vibrant genre that preserved the usual associations of simplicity and tranquility and introduced new elements of tension into the pastoral ideal, including global voices, paradox, and occasional conflict.

Taylor A. Greer is Associate Professor of Music Theory at Pennsylvania State University. He is author of A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music. He has published essays on Gabriel Fauré and Ruth Crawford as well as Charles Seeger, whose aesthetic philosophy served as the seed from which his compositional, critical, and musicological writings all grew.