As in the plastic arts, so in poetry. The imagists, Ezra Pound in
particular, were Chinese long before they discovered Cathay in the works
of Ernest Fennellosa. And in music, certainly, the East is on us; has
been on us since the Russian five began their careers and expressed
their own half-European, half-Mongol, natures. The stream has commenced
setting since the Arabian Nights, the Persian odalisques, the Tartar
tribesmen became music. And the Chinese sensibility of Scriabine, the
Oriental chromatics of the later Rimsky-Korsakoff, the sinuous scales
and voluptuous colors and silken textures of Debussy, the shrill
fantastic Japanese idiom of Strawinsky, have shown us the fusion was
near.
But in the music of no composer is it as plainly evident as it is in
that of Ernest Bloch. In a work like this composer's suite for viola
and piano, one has a sense of a completeness of fusion such as no other
gives. Here, the West has advanced furthest east, the East furthest
west. Two things are balanced in the work, two things developed through
a score of centuries by two uncommunicating regions. The organizing
power of Europe is married to the sensuousness of Asia. The virile
formative power of the heirs of Bach is here. An extended form is solid
as mountains, projects volumes through time.
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