Word: bloch
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...Three men know all about what both sides are doing. One is Admiral Claude Charles Bloch, a country boy from Kentucky who made good as Commander-in-Chief of the U. S. Fleet, and is chief umpire in the Navy game. Another is one time Assistant Secretary of the Navy Franklin Roosevelt, to whom the cruiser Houston was assigned so that he could rove through the battle area, keeping tabs by radio...
...only writes Israelite music, but books and articles expounding its principles and importance. Also prominent in the fold is soft-spoken Joseph Achron. whose smaller works, based on Hebrew themes, have won particular favor with solo recitalists. But foremost among all Zionist-minded composers stands crotchety Swiss-born Ernest Bloch, whose descriptive suite for piano and orchestra. Evocations, was given its first performance last week by the San Francisco Symphony under walrus-faced Pierre Monteux...
...Evocations, as in many earlier works* (Schelomo, Israel Symphony, Sacred Service, Voice in the Wilderness), Bloch mixes French Impressionism with fervent Levantine lamentation, getting an idiomatic pottage peculiarly his own. His finest scores reflect the barbaric splendor of the Old Testament, sing their Hebraic song with prophetic thunder and wailing intensity. Even his "America" Symphony -which won a $5,000 prize offered in 1927 by Musical America for the most distinguished work by a resident American- was colored by Hebraic idioms...
...Composer Bloch fervor has always been instinctive. When he was a youngster running about the shop of his clock merchant father in Geneva, he made a vow that he would become a composer. Unlike most little boys, who would have made the vow and let it go at that, Bloch wrote it out on a scrap of paper, buried it under a mound of stones, built a fire over it, and mumbled incantations while he watched the burning embers...
Though the originality of his early compositions drew high praise from Critic Romain Holland (Jean-Christophe). it was not until he was 35 that Bloch got into his stride as a composer of distinctly Jewish music, began to color his music with scales and intervals derived from ancient synagogal hymns. In 1916 a tour as conductor of a dance troupe took him to the U. S., stranded him in Manhattan. Since then he has made the U. S. his home. He began to write his most important works in the early 1920s while serving as director of the Cleveland Institute...