Word: bloch
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...chamber music hall in Washington, D. C. and to endow the Music Division of the Library of Congress. The hall cost her $94,000, the yearly endowment $25,000.* Washington festivals supplanted the ones in Pittsfield. There was new music by Ravel, Schönberg, Casella, Respighi, Stravinsky, Bloch. Mrs. Coolidge imported quartets from Europe-the Brosa from London, the Roth from Budapest, the Pro Arte from Belgium, the Busch from Germany. She organized the Elshuco Trio...
...contemporary composers who has the respect of conservatives and radicals alike is Ernest Bloch, Jew by blood, Swiss by birth, American by citizenship. Everyone who knows of Bloch knows he is a Jew. His greatest works declaim the suffering of the Hebrews, their religious exaltation. Last week in Manhattan Bloch's faith and eloquence were manifested again in the U. S. premiere of his Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service), a setting for the liturgical texts used in the Hebrew temple. Composer Bloch conducted the performance, given by the 250 choristers of the New York Schola Cantorum, 80 members...
Peace for a Jewish fammily was something unknown when Bloch grew up in Geneva. The community was strongly Gentile, still seething from the Dreyfus affair. In his home Bloch learned Jewish melodies, Jewish lore. There was money enough for him to study for a time in Brussels, Frankfurt, Munich, Paris. Then his father's jewelry business soured and he went home to peddle cuckoo-clocks. In 1916 Bloch landed in the U. S., as accompanist for Maud Allen, a dancer whose tour ended disastrously in Ohio. Bloch took a room in Manhattan. He was penniless but in his trunk...
Because he stood on his own artistically, following no fads, expressing only his own passionate individuality, New York was quick to proclaim Bloch a genius. He got a job teaching at the David Mannes School, went from there to Cleveland, thence to San Francisco. His children settled in New York - Suzanne who teaches music, Lucienne who sculpts and paints, Ivan who is an electrical engineer. But the grind for a living again gave Bloch the feeling that he was a man without a country. The music he was writing (America, Helvetia) added little to his name. He was desperate when...
...Switzerland has refreshed Bloch's musical powers, given him leisure to indulge his passion for mushroom-hunting, made him jovial. His gloomy look vanished with his beard, which he shaved off as a surprise for Suzanne when he met her in Genoa two summers...