Louis Gruenberg (1884) was born in Russia but came to America at the age of two. At nineteen he went to Europe and became the pupil of Ferruccio Busoni, the Italian pianist-composer who spent most of his life in Berlin and Vienna and also taught for two years at the New England Conservatory of Music.

Gruenberg had followed conventional lines of composition for some years, receiving prizes in Berlin and New York (in 1922 he was awarded the Flagler prize for a symphonic poem Hill of Dreams). His works of this period comprise symphonic poems, a string quartet, a piano concerto, a symphony, a suite for violin, also a sonata, two operas, songs and piano pieces.

He began to study America, to ask himself what was the spirit of Americanism that had not yet found its way into music, and his answer was not the Negro jazz, but the white man’s jazz expressing the “spirit of the times.” As a result he changed his way of writing. The compositions of this period are a violin sonata, a set of piano pieces called Polychromatics, a Poem in sonatina form for ’cello, four pieces for string quartet, a viola sonata, an orchestral tone-poem, a group of short piano pieces in jazz rhythms with the amusing name of Jazzberries, three violin pieces in the same style, a group of songs Animals and Insects, texts by Vachel Lindsay, and that same poet’s Daniel which Gruenberg has set as Daniel Jazz for tenor and chamber music orchestra, and Creation, a Negro sermon by James Weldon Johnson, a poet, who has just won the Spingarn Prize for the most distinctive work (1924–1925) of an American of African descent.

Two Jazz Geniuses

Irving Berlin, the genius of the age in writing typical American jazz, was born in Russia and has had no musical training. He picks out his irresistible melodies by ear and his aide writes them down to the delight of the millions in all corners of the earth, from New York to the Sahara desert, where the phonograph has carried them. The sheiks no longer sing in ancient pentatonic melody to their lady loves, but turn on the phonograph which ably plays some of his hundred American songs: My Wife Goes to the Country, Snooky Ookums, Along Came Ruth, If You Don’t Want Me Why Do You Hang Around? Mandy, Say it with Music, What’ll I Do, All Alone, and many from the musical revues (Music Box Revue, especially). His earlier Alexander’s Rag Time Band goes back to cake walk days and has become a classic of its kind and the model for popular music following it. He rose from poverty to riches through giving great delight to the public.

George Gershwin (1898) flashed into the lime-light through his jazz piano concerto Rhapsody in Blue and his extraordinary playing of it with Paul Whiteman’s Orchestra. In this piece we find a merging of classic form with the “voice of the people”! It will be interesting to watch this young man, not yet thirty, to see the outcome of grafting a musical education on to his unusual natural gifts. As a result of the success of his experiment he has been commissioned to write a New York Concerto for the New York Symphony. He is a Brooklyn boy brought up as a “song plugger” for a publisher of popular music, playing their songs in vaudeville acts and in cafés.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes

Charles Tomlinson Griffes (1884–1920) was a poet-composer whose early death was a serious loss to America, for every thing he wrote was an addition to our music. He was impressionistic in style, and we are grateful for the lovely art songs, Five Poems of Ancient China and Japan, three songs with orchestral accompaniment to poems of Fiona MacLeod, ten piano pieces and the Sonata which have never been surpassed in beauty and workmanship by any American, the Poem for flute and orchestra, the string quartet on Indian themes, and his orchestral tone-poem, The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan. For the stage, Griffes composed a Japanese mime-play, Schojo, a dance drama, The Kairn of Korwidwen and Walt Whitman’s Salut au Monde, a dramatic ballet. The last two were presented at the Neighborhood Playhouse, where interesting experiments in music and the drama have been made by the Misses Lewisohn.

Griffes was a native of Elmira, New York, and his first studies were made with Miss Mary S. Broughton, who recognized her young pupil’s unusual talent and took him to Germany for study. His composition work was done with Humperdinck, and Rüfer, and from 1907 until his death he taught music at Hackley, a boys’ school in Tarrytown, New York.

Lawrence Gilman, American critic, says of him: “He was a poet with a sense of comedy.... Griffes had never learned how to pose—he would never have learned how if he had lived to be as triumphantly old and famous as Monsieur Saint-Saëns or Herr Bruch or Signor Verdi.... It was only a short while before his death that the Boston Symphony Orchestra played for the first time (in Boston) his Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan ... and the general concert-going public turned aside ... to bestow an approving hand upon this producer of a sensitive and imaginative tone-poetry who was by some mysterious accident, an American!... He was a fastidious craftsman, a scrupulous artist. He was neither smug nor pretentious nor accommodating. He went his own way,—modestly, quietly, unswervingly ... having the vision of the few....”