s 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. The
voice of Jehovah, has it spoken to those who throughout the ages have
called for it much differently than it speaks at the close of Bloch's
22nd Psalm?

And it is something like the voice of Job that speaks in the desolation
of the third of the "Poemes juives." Once again, the Ecclesiast utters
his disillusion, his cruel disappointment, his sense of the utter vanity
of existence in the soliloquy of the 'cello in the rhapsody "Schelomo."
Once again, the tent of the tabernacle that Jehovah ordered Moses to
erect in the wilderness, and hang with curtains and with veils, lifts
itself in the introduction to the symphony "Israel." The great kingly
limbs and beard and bosom of Abraham are, once again, in the first
movement of the work; the dark, grave, soft-eyed women of the Old
Testament, Rebecca, Rachel, Ruth, re-appear in the second, with its
flowing voices.

Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these
sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts,
bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged
bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its
pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis.
Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line
of the synagogic chants. 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