Music
Bloch's early works, including his opera Macbeth (1910) show the influence of both the Germanic school of Richard Strauss and the impressionism of Claude Debussy. Mature works, including his best-known pieces, often draw on Jewish liturgical and folk music. These works include Schelomo (1916) for cello and orchestra, which he dedicated to the cellist Alexandre Barjansky (of Barjansky Stradivarius fame), the Israel Symphony (1916), Baal Shem for violin and piano (1923, later version for violin and orchestra), the "From Jewish Life" suite for cello and piano, and Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service, 1933) for baritone, choir and orchestra. Other pieces from this period include a violin concerto written for Joseph Szigeti and the rhapsody America for chorus and orchestra, which won a 1927 prize (sponsored by Musical America) for the best symphonic work on an American theme by an American composer. (Bloch qualified because he was a naturalized American citizen.)
Leopold Stokowski and the Symphony of the Air made the first stereo recording of America for Vanguard Records, which included a short speech by Bloch that explained why he wrote the piece; in June 1993, Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra recorded the work for Delos.
Pieces written after World War II are a little more varied in style, though Bloch's essentially Romantic idiom remains. Some, such as the Suite hébraïque (1950) continue the Jewish theme; others, such as the second concerto grosso (1952), display an interest in neo-classicism (though here too the harmonic language is basically Romantic, even though the form is Baroque); and others, including the late string quartets, include elements of atonality.
Read more about this topic: Ernest Bloch
Famous quotes containing the word music:
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We live in the mind, in ideas, in fragments. We no longer drink in the wild outer music of the streets—we remember only.”
—Henry Miller (1891–1980)
“On the first days, like a piece of music that one will later be mad about, but that one does not yet distinguish, that which I was to love so much in [Bergotte’s] style was not yet clear to me. I could not put down the novel that I was reading, but I thought that I was only interested in the subject, as in the first moments of love when one goes every day to see a woman at some gathering, or some pastime, by the amusements to which one believes to be attracted.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)