CHARLES TOMLINSON GRIFFES New World Records 80273 Three Poems of Fiona MacLeod, OP. 11 • Four German Songs • Four Impressions • Song of

musical world was either mourning or celebrating the death of Richard Wagner, who had died the year before in Venice; Johannes Brahms was alive and well in Vienna (he still had about a dozen years to live); Richard Strauss was twenty years old and beginning to make a reputation in Germany; Arnold Schoenberg was a ten-year-old in Vienna; Igor Stravinsky was a mere two years old in Russia; Claude Debussy was a young man of twenty-two who had just been awarded the Prix de Rome in France; and Alexander Scriabin was a twelve-year-old youth in Russia already determined to enter the Moscow Conservatory. All these composers, and many others as well, have been held up by critics and musicologists as having influenced the music of Charles Griffes at one time or another. And, indeed, it is true that Griffes was at first influenced by the German Romantic tradition, then moved toward Impressionism, then found a congenial source of material in the music of the Orient as well as in the poetry of the Scottish-Celtic writer Fiona MacLeod, then for one brief moment in his Two Sketches for String Quartet Based on Indian Themes turned to the music of the American Indian, and finally moved into the realm of absolute music and exhibited a stark, dissonant style approaching atonality. This is remarkable when one remembers that Griffes ' active career as a composer spanned only som