Ernest Bloch

Voices in the Wilderness

Despite the Modernist search for new and innovative aesthetics and rejection of traditional tonality, several twentieth century composers have found their own voice while steadfastly relying on the aesthetics and techniques of Romanticism and 19th century composition principles. Musicological and reference texts have regarded these composers as isolated exceptions to modern thoughts of composition_exceptions of little importance, treated simplistically and superficially. Music critic and scholar Walter Simmons, however, believes these composers and their works should be taken seriously. They are worthy of more scholarly consideration, and deserve proper analysis, assessment, and discussion in their own regard. In Voices in the Wilderness, the first in a series of books celebrating the 'Twentieth-Century Traditionalist,' Simmons looks at six Neo-Romantic composers: Ernest Bloch Howard Hanson Vittorio Giannini Paul Creston Samuel Barber Nicolas Flagello Through biographical overviews and a comprehensive assessment of musical works, Simmons provides readers with a clear understanding of the significance of the composers, their bodies of work, and their placement in musicological history. The chapters delve deeply and objectively into each composer's oeuvre, addressing their origins, stylistic traits and consistencies, phases of development, strengths and weaknesses, and affinities with other composers. The composers' most representative works are identified, and each chapter concludes with a discography of essential recordings. Visit the author's website to read samples from the book and to listen to representative excerpts of each composer's work.

Ernest Bloch and His Music

Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein

David Schiller's study of three works of Jewish music - Ernest Bloch's 'Sacred Service' (1933), Arnold Schoenberg's 'A Survivor from Warsaw' (1947), and Leonard Bernstein's 'Kaddish' (1963) - reveals how, in the mid-twentieth century, the problem of assimilation was acutely felt as the unfinished business of European Jewry, at a time when American Jewry was creating its own distinctive culture (albeit with European roots). He shows how the business of 'assimilating Jewish music' is as much a process audiences themselves engage in when they listen to Jewish music as it is something critics and musicologists do when they write about it. He further asserts that this process of assimilation is performed by the music itself - that Jewish music assimilates into the Western tradition of art music when it appears in the form of concert genres like the oratorio, cantata, and symphony. In rethinking the Jewish works of Bloch, Schoenberg, and Bernstein as part of the legacy of assimilation, David Schiller sheds new light on an important aspect of their cultural and aesthetic achievements.