But there is music of Ernest Bloch that is a large, a poignant, an
authentic expression of what is racial in the Jew. There is music of his
that is authentic by virtue of qualities more fundamentally racial than
the synagogical modes on which it bases itself, the Semitic pomp and
color that inform it. There are moments when one hears in this music the
harsh and haughty accents of the Hebrew tongue, sees the abrupt gestures
of the Hebrew soul, feels the titanic burst of energy that created the
race and carried it intact across lands and times, out of the eternal
Egypt, through the eternal Red Sea. There are moments when this music
makes one feel as though an element that had remained unchanged
throughout three thousand years, an element that is in every Jew and by
which every Jew must know himself and his descent, were caught up in it
and fixed there. Bloch has composed settings for the Psalms that are the
very impulse of the Davidic hymns incarnate in another medium; make it
seem as though the genius that had once flowered at the court of the
king had attained miraculous second blooming. The setting of the 114th
Psalm is the very voice of the rejoicing over the passage of the Red
Sea, the very lusty blowing on ox horns, the very hieratic dance.
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