Many of his melodic bits, although pure
inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, after
all, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch's melodic
line, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes,
approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like so
much of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one can
conceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like
the melodic line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in the
setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also,
might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. The
unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at
once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric
Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of
Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous
rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and
tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European
music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite
like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work,
has ever before appeared.
And it was not until the Jewish note appeared in his work that Bloch
spoke his proper language.
Pages:
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295