Quotes

Isolated in nature for several years, Bloch began to do a series of tree photographs. Lucienne [Bloch Dimitroff] describes her memories:

It took him a good year to finally get to photographing them, because when I was there, and we were walking he would say, “You have no idea how extraordinary these trees are when there are few leaves, and when it’s dark in back so they show up.” He kept saying, “I’ve got to photograph them, I must make a study of trees.” And that’s when he would point to them and say, “Now look at this — this harmony of trunks” . . .

Bloch saw music in trees. He labeled some of his tree photographs according to the musical composer who he felt was similar in feeling and structure: “Debussy,” “Bach,” “Beethoven,” and “Mozart.” The photographs evoke feelings much like each composer’s music. His “Debussy” tree is a continuous thread, incomplete within the frame. Figure-ground relationships become ambiguous, structure is loose and feeling is undefined. His trunks with a complex background. Bloch sees “Beethoven” invariably as a single massive tree appearing to twist and struggle out of the soil. “Mozart” is much different; a deceptively light, but sturdy, tree, complete within the frame and clearly defined by light.

Quoted in “Aperture 16:3” in “A Composer’s Vision: photographs by Ernest Bloch.”

This note appeared for the author, Eric Johnson:

Eric Johnson is a free-lance photographer working in Portland. He prepared Ernest Bloch: A Composer’s Vision for an independent study thesis at the University of Oregon in 1971. In compiling the necessary biographical information and in makig the prints from Bloch’s negatives, he was given the kind assistance of Ernest Bloch’s children — Ivan Bloch, Lucienne Dimitroff, and Suzanne Bloch.

Eric Johnson is currently on the faculty at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo in Art & Design.  The following biography was found on his website: www.ericjohnsonphoto.com.

Eric B. Johnson, BA. 1971 University of Oregon; MFA, Photography, University of New Mexico, 1978, researched, printed and wrote about the photography of 20th century composer Ernest Bloch. (Aperture, 1971, “A Composers Vision: The Photographs of Ernest Bloch”) His landscapes of golf courses as a form of “earth art” were published by The Friends of Photography in 1980, New Landscapes. He taught photography at Western Washington University, 1978, and Ohio State University in Columbus, 1979. In 1980 he moved to California to join the faculty at California Polytechnic State University.

In the 1980’s his work ranged from color landscapes of an archaeology of California titled “Abandoned Highways” to “Scenes of the Pacific War”—enamel spray on color prints using still framed video from WWII. Earlier work was also included in the major survey by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art titled “Photographs From The Last Decade” in 1987. He moved to the digital environment in 1989 in order to execute the concept of “Videoglyphs.” This work was included in exhibits including “Digital Art” at Purdue University; “Currents in Electronic Imaging” at Pacific Lutheran University; “Digital Masters” at Ansel Adams Gallery, San Francisco, as well as at Cuesta College in “Key Strokes.” It has also been included in the Adobe Photoshop CD-ROM Digital Art Gallery. This work was been included in the national survey exhibit titled “New Realities: Hand-Colored Photographs 1839 to the Present” at the University of Wyoming Museum of Art and five other museums.

In 2000-02 extensive photographic work on Ireland golf courses resulted in a collaborative book with Paul Zingg titled “An Emerald Odyssey: In Search of the Gods of Golf and Ireland,” published by Collins Press in 2008. In 2004 he produced a body of work in collage using images from the Gettysburg battlefield. Since 2006 Eric has been involved in new digital collage and still life series using personal and political references from the late 1960’s, including his images of Robert Kennedy and Richard Nixon. This work has resulted in a major new series titled “Shrines and Altars 2008.”

Ernest Bloch’s is a name with which to reckon in reviewing the ebb and flow of twentieth-century music. It is a name whose bearer was often removed, physically and musically, from the primary tributaries of the artistic currents of the age. An admirer of the visionary poet Walt Whitman, Bloch adopted as his theme of life that wordsmith’s line “Give me solitude, give me Nature.” A seeker after those dual attributes, Truth and Beauty, Bloch was uncompromising in holding fast to the tenets of art and life he believed to be inviolable.

Ernest Bloch holds a unique place in the history of twentieth-century art music. He was a public figure for much of his life, particularly during his years in New York, Cleveland, and San Francisco, but he was not a public person, at least not in the traditional sense of that term. He held fast to the traditions of the past, particularly those upon which he was nurtured. His love of Renaissance choral music, for example, brought him comfort and solace, poignantly so during his final days of life.

The music of Ernest Bloch is, above all else, sincere. It would be grossly naïve to label it “Jewish” or nationalistic; it is, rather, humanistic. As a result, it delivers a universal message. History, the final arbiter in all aspects of the human enterprise, will, in all likelihood, reserve for Ernest Bloch a place of honor in the pantheon of the musical elite of the twentieth century.

From David Z. Kushner’s The Ernest Bloch Companion, Greenwood Press, 2002, pages 1-10.

More about David Z. Kushner.

His book, Ernest Bloch: A Guide to Research (Garland), has been described as “a reference work that is enjoyable to read” (Notes) and one that “provides well-written evaluative annotations that easily stimulate a researcher’s interest in examining the sources” (Choice). A subsequent book,The Ernest Bloch Companion (Greenwood), integrates the composer’s life and works, treats the influence of religion on his creative efforts, and encourages a rethinking of his place in the history of 20^th-century music. “Kushner is today’s foremost specialist on Swiss-American composer Ernest Bloch (1880-1959)” (Choice). This book is “the most informative publication on the composer’s life and works currently in general circulation…The book contains much interesting andprovocative information” (Fanfare). It is “an excellent survey of the relationship between the life of Ernest Bloch and his compositions…A fine book for admirers of Bloch (Opera Journal). Dr. Kushner’s articles, “Religious Ambiguity in the Life and Works of Ernest Bloch,” “John Powell: His Racial and Cultural Ideologies,” “Reflections on the State Songs of Florida,” and “Ernest Bloch: The Cleveland Years (1920-1925)” appear in Min-Ad, the online journal of the Israel Musicological Society.

Ernest Bloch was one of the most interesting, inventive and successful composers, recognised and appreciated during his lifetime as a successor to Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. While these three giants developed and established their own definite style within their own respective historical period, Bloch was unique. He was a wanderer and explorer, caring nothing for the fashions of the time. He possessed the supreme qualities of a great creator in each of the varied styles in which he wrote throughout his whole life.

Music was Bloch’s most authentic language for the expression of his individuality, ideas, philosophy, profound intellect, truthfulness and ethnicity, all perfectly balanced. At the same time he carried within himself and passed on his feelings of Weltschmertz, love and hope.

For several years during World War II he wrote nothing, but found his salvation in J.S. Bach. In his later compositions he returned to modality and polyphony, whether modern or conventional. After his death, Bloch became internationally famous, but known to the new generation only for several compositions in his Jewish style. It is baffling, almost fifty years after his death, that most of his works should have remained hidden from the present-day generation. The challenge now for performers and listeners is to understand Bloch’s multiple styles, and the secret of its correct interpretation.

— Dalia Atlas

Dalia Atlas was born in Israel, graduated from the Music Academy of Jerusalem, and studied conducting with the most distinguished teachers abroad. She won seven prizes in international conducting competitions, the first woman conductor to achieve this. Her wide repertoire includes about 750 scores, among them hitherto unknown music, some of which are her own discoveries, and also arrangements of her own.

She has conducted some seventy orchestras in concerts, festivals and recordings, and broadcasts in 29 countries, among them the Israel Philharmonic, Philadelphia Orchestra, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Philharmonia in London, Helsinki Philharmonic, ABC orchestras in Australia, Warsaw Symphony, Brazil Symphony, Buenos Aires Philharmonic, Maggio Musicale in Florence, the Slovak Philharmonic and the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Czech Radio Orchestra, and the Berlin Symphony Orchestra. In Israel she has founded many musical and cultural organizations, orchestras and choirs, both professional and educational, serving as Music Director and Principal Conductor for many years.

In pursuit of her philanthropic ideals, Dalia Atlas has travelled widely with her orchestras, the Israel Pro Musica and Atlas Camerata, at her own expense, in order to promote music education for children in schools and concert halls. Her research on the music of Ernest Bloch resulted in her undertaking the promotion and recording of the composer’s neglected compositions. To date, she has recorded about 20 of his orchestral works for ASV and Naxos.

In 2005 Dalia Atlas decided to terminate all her permanent positions in order to share her wide repertoire and experience as a guest conductor all over the world with orchestras, operas and festivals.

In one of his “Peanuts” strips (August 20, 1966), the conversation between the characters (Linus and Lucy) reads as follows:

“You think Beethoven was great . . . ”

“Well, what about Chopin, Bach, Mozart, Bloch, Bartok, Berlioz, Bizet, Brahms, Delius, Debussy ad Dvorak?”

“What about Elgar, Franck, Glinka, Grieg, Handel, Haydn, Humperdinck, Liszt, Mahler, Mendelssohn, Ravel, Rachmaninoff, Schubert, Sibelius, Tschaikowsky and Vivaldi.”

“They were great too.”  “Rats! For one brief moment I thought I had him!”

With the Songs of the Sky (1923) Alfred would “show them.” In particular, the new Cloud series would silence the innuendos of Waldo Frank, who had explained the penetrating brilliance of Stieglitz’s portraits by his ability to hypnotize his subjects.

Both the formal and expressive problems solved in the making of these pictures would reveal everything he had learned in forty years, Stieglitz wrote to Bayley. Fixing the most mutable of forms, he would at the same time “put down my philosophy of life — to show that my photographs were not due to subject matter — not to special trees, or faces, or interiors, to special privileges, clouds were there for everyone — not tax as yet on them — free.”

Alfred’s ambition for his new series reached higher. Its musical title referred to the symbolist theory of correspondences between all art forms and staked Alfred’s claim to surpassing the symphonic masters. Along with others of the American avant-garde, he and Georgia were one in their belief that music — in its fusion of intuitive expressive content and abstract rational form — was the most perfect of the arts. Georgia had used musical title for several abstractions of 1919. Now Alfred’s Songs of the Sky would show that a great photograph could attain — even surpass — this condition of the absolute, reducing a great composer to abject envy.

“I had told Miss O’Keeffe I wanted a series of photographs which when seen by       Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: ‘Music! Music! Man, why that is music!  How did you ever do that?’ And he would point to vilons, and flutes, and oboes, and brass, full of enthusiasm, and would say he’d have to write a symphony called ‘Clouds.’  Not like Debussy’s but much, much more.”

According to Stieglitz, the fantasy became reality “when finally I had my series of ten photographs printed, and Bloch saw them — what I said I wanted to happen happened verbatim,” he insisted.

Unfortunately, there were no witnesses to Alfred’s triumph. The meeting of the two men took place; Alfred wrote Bloch thanking the composer for the hour he had spent looking at his photographs. But for Bloch’s reaction — the fantasy that became reality — we have Alfred’s account alone.

— By Benita Eisler in O’Keeffe & Stieglitz: An American Romance

In Benita Eisler’s biography of Georgia O’Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz, she wrote that Alfred “and Georgia were one in their belief that music — in its fusion of intuitive expressive content and abstract rational form — was the most perfect of the arts.” Alfred is quoted as saying: “I had told Miss O’Keeffe I wanted a series of photographs which when seen by Ernest Bloch (the great composer) he would exclaim: “Music! Music! Man, why that is music! How did you ever do that?” And he would point to violins, and flutes, and oboes, and brass, full of enthusiasm, and would say he’d have to write a symphony called “Clouds.” “According to Stieglitz, the fantasy became reality “when finally I had my series of ten photographs printed, and Bloch saw them– what I said I wanted to happen happened verbatim,” he insisted.

Interview – Conversation with Zara Nelsova – by Tim Janof

International Cello Society Newsletter – June 2, 2000

TJ: You’ve also worked with some famous composers, like Ernest Bloch. How did you get the privilege of playing Schelomo with him?

ZN: I often practiced Schelomo and the other pieces he wrote for us. One day I was talking to Colin Hampton, cellist of the Griller String Quartet, who knew Bloch very well and had performed his chamber works. He said, “You’ve got to meet Ernest Bloch. He is an extraordinary man, a great composer, and I know he would love your playing.” So Colin arranged our meeting and I went to Oregon, where Bloch lived with his wife and cats. I had been on the bus for about three hours when I arrived at the bus station at night in the pouring rain. A man waiting for my bus to arrive, with an umbrella over him and a little beret on his head, turned out to be Ernest Bloch.

He and his wife made me feel so welcome. They put me in a guest flat that they had built over their garage. Downstairs was the equipment that Bloch used for his agate polishing hobby, using agates that he collected from the beach. He used to stand in the garage and polish agates while listening to me practice upstairs. Very often I would hear the tramp of feet coming up the steps and he would suddenly appear wearing his hip rubber boots and his little beret, saying “No, no, no, not like this, like this!” And then he would sit down at the piano with those rubber boots and we would start to work together. We worked on Schelomo, The Voice in the Wilderness, and Three Pieces from Jewish Life.

Soon after that a Bloch festival was organized in London and he invited me to come as his soloist in Schelomo. Right after the performance we recorded it together, which was re-released about a year ago, with Bloch conducting, as well as our recording of the Three Pieces.

We developed a great friendship over the years. Once I asked him if he would write an unaccompanied cello sonata? “Oh,” he said, “I don’t know … how would I do that? Play me something.” So I sat down and played him a little of the Kodaly solo sonata. “No, no, that’s not my style.” Then I played some of the Reger Second Suite. “No, no, that’s not my style.” Nothing would please him.

Soon after — I think I was in Europe at the time — I received a letter from him saying that he was at work on an unaccompanied suite. He ended up sending me three suites, one at a time, the first two being dedicated to me. The third he meant to dedicate to me, but he sent it to me in Europe to edit and I didn’t get it in time. He didn’t hear from me so he assumed that I didn’t like it. The work remains undedicated. All three suites are very beautiful, but I play the first one more than the others.

TJ: It sounds like Bloch was very particular about how his music should be played. Did he ever talk about how much vibrato he wanted?

ZN: No, we never discussed vibrato. He certainly didn’t object to my use of it.

TJ: Steven Isserlis, who has also recorded Schelomo, often minimizes his use of vibrato in this piece, using bow expression instead.

ZN: Hmm.

TJ: You don’t seem agree with this approach. Why?

ZN: If you listen to my recordings of Schelomo, I think you’ll find your answer. Bloch and I worked together very closely. I understood what he wanted, and he seemed to be happy when we played together. He once said, “Zara Nelsova is my music.”

I recorded Schelomo three times, first with Bloch, second with Ansermet — the great conductor of l’Orchestra de la Suisse Romande — and third with Maurice Abravinel and the Utah Symphony. I must have been doing something right to be asked to record it again and again.

See <http://www.cello.org/Newsletter/Articles/nelsova.htm>

The second generation of a distinguished Russian musical family, Ms. Nelsova was born in Canada, educated in England, and is a citizen of the USA. She made her debut with the London Symphony at age 12, and since that time has regularly toured every continent, including her triumphant tour of the Soviet Union in 1966 as the first to be made by an American soloist.

Zara Nelsova has appeared with virtually every major orchestra in North America including those of New York, Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia. She has appeared with numerous European orchestras including the Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, Royal, Berlin, and London Philharmonics, the BBC and London symphony orchestras, and in Warsaw and Poznan with the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. She has collaborated with such eminent conductors as Bernstein, Boulez, Barenboim, Mehta, Haitink, Solti, Boehm, Rostropovich, Ozawa, and Steinberg. Her many international festival appearances have included Tanglewood, Hollywood Bowl, Aspen, Caramoor, Ann Arbor, Lucerne, Casals, Prague, Gstaad, and Bergen.

She has collaborated with many well-known twentieth century composers. Samuel Barber chose her for the recording of his Cello Concerto, as did Ernest Bloch for his “Schelomo.” She performed Sir William Walton’s Cello Concerto under the baton of the composer as well.

Ms. Nelsova is the recipient of Canada’s Centennial Medal of the Confederation “in recognition of valuable service to the nation,” and the Jubilee Medal from Canada in honor of the Silver Anniversary of the accession to the throne of Her Royal Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. Ms. Nelsova is a fellow at the Royal Academy of Music, a member of the faculty of The Juilliard School, and chair on the Board of Governors as professor of music at Rutgers University. In 1992, she received an honorary degree from Smith College.

“I arrived at Agate Beach one rainy night. There, waiting for me at the bus stop, was a stocky figure in a cape and beret. Ernest and Marguerite Bloch welcomed me to their home above the Pacific coast; and I was immediately taken by their enormous warmth. They accommodated me in the studio that Bloch had built above the garage. In the garage there was a machine for polishing the agates that he loved to collect on the beach. As our friendship progressed, I would often accompany him during these expeditions.  We worked together on Schelomo, Voice in the Wilderness, and From Jewish Life, as I wanted to absorb his ideas about these works. At that time there were no plans for public performances or recordings together. Sometimes, when I ws practising, I would hear Bloch’s heavy footsteps as he ascended the stairs in his hip boots and then the door would open: ‘No, No, No! Not like that, but like this!’ and he would sit at the piano in his rubber boots, and we would work together for many hours. He always emphasised, for example, that Schelomo was a Rhapsody, not a Romance; and he objected to the fact that performances of this work were too often exaggerated and therefore distorted.”

— Zara Nelsova in conversation with Alexander Knapp, September 1996.

[According to Lewinski, Zara Nelsova came to Agate Beach for a day in December 1957 and played the ‘seconde Suite pour violoncelle seul.’]

[According to Lewinski, Zara Nelsova came to Agate Beach for three days in November 1954.]

Conversations with Menuhin

by David Dubal

DUBAL: I know that you are fond of Ernest Bloch’s music. Since his death his music has suffered an eclipse. He seems hard to put in a category.

MENUHIN: Very hard for the people who like to pigeonhole, also Bloch’s rhapsodic style is hard to formulate, since his music is very largely a series of statements and meditations, although he is the most famous Swiss composer, and he always returned there, and loved the mountains. Bloch is essentially a Jewish composer, in his dee and guttural feeling for the Jewish cry of despair.

DUBAL: I think his art is deeply penetrating. The string quartets are an extraordinary contribution to the form. There is a burning passion, also a frustration, as well as a sarcastic irony at times.

MENUHIN: I fully agree, and he was tortured — a prophetic man, who looked astonishingly like an Old Testament face. He wrote beautifully for the violin — you know he was a very good player. Do you know that the first piece I ever played by a living composer was by Bloch, a wonderful piece called Avodah, which he composed for me. I was a child of about seven or eight. Bloch was a great teacher. And he was the director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

David Dubal, author of Reflections from the Keyboard and The Art of the Piano, taught piano literature at The Juilliard School of Music. He was also musical director of the classical music radio station WNCN.

Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

pp. 40-41

ISBN: 0-15-122586-9

“Ernest Bloch has always seemed to me to be one of the Seven Wonders. Like Hercules, a world of ecstasy, of pain rested on his shoulders. He also seemed at one with the great vistas and jagged peaks of the Swiss Alps, against which he loved to photograph himself (he was a superb photographer, one of the first generation of Leica fanatics!), as at Agate Beach, with the pounding Pacific breakers. He was cast by the gods in a superhuman mold — a prophetic scale of size and vision, of strength and vitality which exceeded the common mortal’s.”  — Yehudi Menuhin

[Both of the following entries can be found in Lewinski.]

Yehudi Menuhin came to visit the Blochs in Agate Beach on January 9, 1954.

Yehudi and Diana Menuhin came to see him on January 14, 1958 – from Portland, six hours by car for the round trip – to spend two very touching hours with them and to commission a work for solo violin.

School is out and softball season is over and 12-year-old Allegra Leah Shapiro is looking forward to a pleasant summer doing kid things. Then comes a surprise. Mr. Kaplan, Allegra’s violin teacher, tells her she is a finalist in the fictional Ernest Bloch Competition for Young Musicians of Oregon. She’ll compete on Labor Day. ”This is the Mozart season,” Mr. Kap-lan says. So much for kid things. Allegra’s summer-long task is to get her playing of Mozart’s Violin Concerto No. 4, in D into competition shape. But as she delves deeper into the often subtle difficulties of the piece, she also faces vexing questions about life. One of them is a problem of ethnic identity: Her father is Jewish and her mother is a gentile, and her brother David says he and Allegra are never going to be fully accepted by either group. ”Religious Jews feel sorry for us; Gentiles think we’re Very Interesting. We’re outsiders to all of them.” But Allegra has support: loving parents; two close friends; an eccentric older musician with a mysterious past; and perhaps even the spiritual presence of Mozart, who composed the concerto when he was a kid (19 years old) himself. She is also inspired by stories of her great-grandmother Leah, who perished in a death camp in World War II. Virginia Euwer Wolff’s novel, which gathers strength as it progresses, offers intriguing glimpses into the life and work of professional musicians (the author is a violinist herself) while unpretentiously exploring age-old philosophical questions. The ending is quite satisfying. There are no pat answers, but Allegra is a much more mature person at the end of the Mozart season than she was at the beginning.

Selected Quote: By Ray Bogas, former member of the Griller Quartet.

Ernest Bloch was one of the giants of the musical world in the twentieth century. His story is a truly American one. Born in Switzerland and risen to a degree of fame in Europe, he was among those who sought refuge and new opportunities in this country at the time of the First World War. In 1919, at the age of 39, he was awarded the coveted Coolidge Prize in New York for his Viola Suite, and this launched his successful career in America. In gratefulness to his adopted homeland, he wrote his First Symphony, subtitled “America.” which presented a panorama of American cultural roots and contained, in the last movement, a truly stirring anthem, worthy of becoming a national anthem. It is sung by a chorus of voices, and is akin to “America the Beautiful” in feeling and ease of singing. I have always felt that this new anthem is more appropriate to our national sensibility than the current anthem, which is a battle song and a bit awkward in its melodic line.

Be that as it may, Bloch fully demonstrated his love of this country and he went on to become director of two of the top music conservatories, in Cleveland and San Francisco, while his works were performed all over the country. While there was a period of time in the latter part of the twentieth century when his music was less performed, there is now a renascence of
interest in his music and 2009 will see many performances of his various works throughout the country.

There can be no doubt that Ernest Bloch stands as one of the very finest of composers, the quality of his work putting him in the ranks of such major figures as Bach, Beethoven and Brahms, the “three B’s”. Bloch naturally becomes the “fourth B”, and we can take pride in his being an American. I think it would be most fitting that his home at Agate Beach be set aside as a Heritage Site and stand as a permanent reminder that great things can be accomplished in this country of ours and that America holds out its welcoming arms to the great talents of the world who come here to work and contribute their creativity to the fabric of our society.

I may add that I knew Bloch and studied with him in rehearsal and classroom settings. He was an amazing Bach scholar, and his discoveries and use of a whole new harmonic vocabulary assures his place in the annals of music history. There have been a number of fine American composers in the twentieth century, some perhaps better recognized, but none greater.

by Ray Bogas on the occasion of making a case for why the person who lived at 116 N.W. Gilbert Way in Agate Beach (Newport), Oregon is of sufficient significance as to warrant that the home in which he lived for the last quarter of his life be put on the National Historic Register.

[According to Lewinski, the Griller Quartet comes to Agate Beach for three days to study the ‘troisième Quatuor’ with him. It is dedicated to them.]

[According to Lewinski, the Griller Quartet came to play the Fifth Quartet for Bloch in July 1957.]

Would you like to hear some Bloch, my little love?”

The story is set in New York City in the 1920’s, 30’s and 40’s and revolves around a boy (Patrick) being reared by his eccentric, slightly outrageous, but loving Auntie Mame.

In this scene, in his bestseller Auntie Mame, Patrick Dennis has his character, Mame Dennis, exposing her nephew to different composers, “exciting modern masters.”   Patrick (now a Junior at St. Boniface Academy), the narrator in the story, says, “Auntie Mame had sent me to Boston that afternoon to buy a lot of new Bartok records, and she insisted on playing them at full volume.  “Ah, my little love,” she said, pouring herself a drink, “a quiet evening at home, à deux, and a chance to have a little chat and listen to some really exciting modern masters.”  Later, given the context of the story, while caring for the pregnant Agnes Gooch, Auntie Mame opines, “Of course, music therapy is important to the expectant mother, if only for the strong prenatal influences, but I do get a bit weary of Glazunov and Meyerbeer — pretty as they are.” Later she asks, “Would you like to hear some Bloch, my little love?”

Auntie Mame: An Irreverent Escapade by Patrick Dennis, 1955, pp. 194-95

[ISBN 0-8161-5987-4]

Found in the G. K. Hall Large Print Perennial Bestseller Collection.

Under his pseudonyms of Patrick Dennis and Virginia Rowans, Edward Everett (Pat) Tanner III was the author of sixteen novels — most of them best sellers — including the now-classic Little Me and Auntie Mame.

From a 1937 dedication printed in the program announcing the formation of an Ernest Bloch Society in New York.

An outstanding figure in the art of the early twentieth century, Ernest Bloch has produced music of a potency and splendor which is manna for the rising generation and a stinging rebuke to the insincerity and sterility of the great mass of the compositions which are produced today. No one who hears and becomes actually en rapport with his representative works can fail to be aware of a great freshening current of creative force. For this is living music, of rich melodic invention and of harmonic and instrumental coloring which is racial as well as individual with this great composer. Its elementality, intense passion, and headlong sincerity are balanced by a master’s technique and an original treatment of form.

Of late, incomprehensible as it may seem, conductors have neglected to give his works their proportionate place on programs, except in instances when articulate public demand necessitated certain performances. This is a condition which will take care of itself, since the Bloch of the Israel Symphony, the magnificent settings for solo voice and orchestra of the Psalms, the Schelomo for ‘cello and orchestra, the first violin and piano Sonata, the Jewish Poems, the piano Quintet–to mention a few of his finest creations, is a composer whose position will be unassailable and constantly more influential in the years to come. It is furthermore music which, like all great art, constantly grows on the listener or student and increases in popularity because of its intrinsic qualities of feeling and beauty.

All of Bloch’s compositions should be performed and recorded in a way to make them widely accessible and to enable us to undertake a critical examination of them with a thoroughness and comprehensiveness of information which are at present lacking. The Society or other organization which works for the propagation of this music is not only conferring a benefit upon its contemporaries, but building prophetically for the generations to come.

Signed “OLIN DOWNES”

When I was a child we often went to a place at the beach.  One time, when I was 9 years old,  my mother took me to Ernest Bloch’s house so I could play the piano for him. He had written piano music for his daughters, Lucienne and Suzanne. I still have a palpable feeling of being surrounded by beauty, art and books.  It was a powerful sensation, and although at the time I didn’t realize exactly what it was, I now know that the mood in this room exuded the all-encompassing culture of “the arts”.  I remember playing in the big living room, and I remember feeling very timid to be playing in front of a well known composer. He was very kind and put me at ease;  I certainly should have understood that this music (Enfantines) was written by a man who related to and understood children. It is delightful music, which I have loved through the years, and which I taught to my own children.  I still have the music, in which, as a child, I had colored in the drawings on the sheet music.  The stories told by the music and drawings became very real to me.

[On the occasion of planning for putting the Ernest Bloch house on the National Historic Register of Historic Place.]

Pianist Janet Goodman Guggenheim has given recitals throughout the world both as soloist and collaborative artist, performing with such illustrious musicians as violinists Itzhak Perlman and Pinchas Zukerman, bassist Gary Karr, flutist Ransom Wilson, and cellists Pierre Fournier and Matt Haimovitz.

Guggenheim made her debut with the San Francisco Symphony at the age of 16 under the baton of Arthur Fiedler, and she has since performed with the orchestra on its subscription series. She recently appeared as soloist with the Oregon Symphony under the batons of James DePriest and Murray Sidlin. She was a co-founder of the Chamber Soloists of San Francisco and has performed at the festivals of Carmel, Cabrillo, Marin, Sacramento, Mendocino, and Seattle, and at Chamber Music Northwest, the San Francisco Symphony Russian Festival, and the Hollywood Bowl.

Guggenheim’s longtime collaboration with Itzhak Perlman includes recent tours throughout Europe and Asia. The duo appeared in recital in 1990 at Tchaikovsky Hall in Moscow and in 1992 at the Istanbul International Festival. In December 1994 she performed in recital with Perlman in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taipei.

Guggenheim received a master’s degree from the Juilliard School, where she worked as studio pianist for the renowned pedagogues Ivan Galamian, Dorothy DeLay, Joseph Fuchs, and Leonard Rose. Her current CD releases include the complete cello and piano works of Rachmaninoff with cellist Michael Grebanier (Naxos). She has been on the music faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. She resides in Portland, Oregon.