ABSTRACT
The music of Charles Tomlinson Griffes represents a pivotal moment in American musical life. Griffes’s experimental approach to the pastoral provides an opportunity to reconsider an essential aspect of signification: the relationship between the concept of a group such as a musical topic and an unusual individual case. The notion of heterotopia captures well the quandaries of trying to classify Griffes’s highly varied pastorals into a single overarching group. Griffes’s significance in twentieth-century American music is twofold: his unique style that relied on a vibrant yet ambivalent aesthetic; and his conception of the pastoral, which transformed the siciliana-based tradition he had inherited from the eighteenth century into a new expressive genre. It is appropriate to begin our study of Griffes’s pastorals by focusing briefly on the founding father of topic theory, twentieth-century composer and musicologist, Leonard Ratner. In the context of Griffes’s oeuvre the musical pastoral falls somewhere between a dance and a style, for it has characteristics of both.
