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Charles Tomlinson Griffes was born in Elmira, New York on September 17, 1884 and died on April 8, 1920.

Before America had established a recognizable classical composing school of its own, our turn-of-the-century composers fell strongly under the sway of European traditions. Most musicians went abroad to study and absorb the national styles of Germany and France. Griffes went to Germany in 1904 with the intent of becoming a concert pianist. While there he supplemented his piano studies with lessons in composition from Wagner's disciple Engelbert Humperdinck (composer of Hansel and Gretel), and eventually gave up performance in favor of composition. 

Although considered by many to be an American Impressionist composer, he was a composer whose works stretched far beyond this general classification. To label him as such is to disregard the majority of his compositions, compositions that range from works in a German Romantic style to pieces composed in an experimental way. He was aware of what was happening musically in the United States and around the world, and he used these elements, along with his own individual style, in his compositions. 

Griffes was among the most talented American composers of his generation -- a fine musical craftsman who experimented constantly in search of a personal musical voice. His earliest works, written while he was a conservatory student in Berlin, are thoroughly German and Romantic in style, but after returning to the United States in 1907 (to take a teaching job at a New York private school for boys), his musical language expanded to include Impressionistic textures influenced by Debussy and striking musical devices. His best-known works come from 1917 and later: beginning with the orchestral tone-poem The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla Khan, he created a personal style that blends uncompromising dissonances with beautifully flowing melodies, and occasional Oriental effects.

Dating from 1910, The Lake at Evening (the first movement of Three Tone Pictures, Op. 5) shows Griffes beginning to turn away from the German Romantic style to a more nontraditional voice, using many of the elements of the Impressionist style. 

The manuscript bears the epigraph:

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