I would just like to put in a good word...

...for a composer mentioned in the first chapter of our textbook: Charles Tomlinson Griffes.  As an aficionado of his music- since you can't really be a "fan" of a Famous Dead Composer- I know that not many people seem to know who he is.  Or particularly care.  And since he's in the first chapter, is discussed after Charles Ives, and wasn't particularly "radical," his time clearly still hasn't come.

If, however, you are interested in exploring music new to you which won't assault your senses, look up his name in the Naxos database or search for him in the UK online catalog.  Griffes seems to be the only (North) American Impressionistic composer in existence.  He studied formally for some years in Germany but was fascinated by the music of Mussorgsky and Debussy and his scores reflect that.  Flautists will know him through his "Poem for Flute and Orchestra," my first exposure to his music, but he also wrote a small body of tone poems and and solo piano works.

"The White Peacock" is analyzed in the text but just as good are "Clouds" and "Bacchanale"; these are comparable to Debussy's "Nuages" and "Fetes", respectively, as much as one piece of music can be said to resemble another.  "The Pleasure Dome of Kubla Khan" is a longer tone poem full of that misty, woodwind-saturated, Impressionistic goodness, although Griffes' music seems to have more angst than his French counterpart.

Another almost-totally forgotten composer in a similar style actually was French: Charles Koechlin.  Capable of an infinite variety of shadings and colors in his orchestrations, Koechlin likewise let out some angst: many of his scores employ polytonality or atonality or both, yet "Impressionistic" is still the word I would use to describe his music.  Many of Koechlin's works were inspired by literature, among them a set of tone poems on Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book."

I don't want to get on a soapbox and harangue the masses, I just wanted to share some music that I've recently discovered and enjoy very much.  And yes, Koechlin was not "American" - but we already had that discussion in class.