Avery Claflin

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Avery Claflin (January 21, 1898 – January 9, 1979) was an American composer who also built a career in business. He studied law and business, then worked in banking and eventually became president of the French American Banking Corp. He took music courses at Harvard University, and one of his teachers was the French composer Erik Satie. Claflin also worked as a business associate of the composer Charles Ives.

He kept composing and stayed active in musical groups even while working in business. He retired in 1954, and many of his works were written after that. One piece is a madrigal called Lament for April 15, which uses text from instructions for an Internal Revenue Service tax form. It premiered in 1955 at Tanglewood in Berkshire County, Massachusetts. Each year on April 15, radio host Karl Haas would play a recording of this piece on his program Adventures in Good Music.