Ernest Bloch

• Born: July 24, 1880, Geneva, Switzerland
• Died: July 15, 1959, Portland, Oregon

Danzón No. 2

• Composed: 1922; orchestrated 1924
  
• Premiere: 1950, New York City
  
• Duration: approx. 12 minutes

Ernest Bloch took his initial music training in Geneva, the city of his birth, later attending courses in Brussels (as a violin student of Eugène Ysaÿe, who also was a Music Director of the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra), Frankfurt and Munich. He returned to Geneva in 1903 to teach composition and esthetics at the Conservatory, gaining a reputation as a conductor of his own works during the following years. In 1917, he moved to New York, where he joined the faculty of the Mannes School of Music. Three years later, he became director of the Cleveland Institute of Music, a post he held for five years; in 1925, he was appointed head of the San Francisco Conservatory. Bloch left San Francisco and the United States in 1930 to return to Switzerland, but he was forced from Europe in 1939 by World War II and came back to America, settling in 1941 along the Oregon coast, where he spent the rest of his life. From the time of his return until he died in 1959, except for a few summers teaching at Berkeley, Bloch devoted himself entirely to composition.

Although Bloch’s administrative and teaching duties at the Cleveland Institute limited his time for creative work, he continued to compose and completed several important works before he left for the San Francisco Conservatory in 1925. Among them was Poems of the Sea, composed for piano in 1922 and orchestrated two years later, whose genesis the composer’s daughter, Suzanne Bloch, described in Creative Spirit, her biography of her father: "In the summer of 1921, Bloch took his family for a vacation to Percé, in Canada, at the edge of the Gaspé Peninsula.… During his solitary walks on the Percé beaches, Bloch began to think of music, which he jotted down in a little book. The following year in Cleveland, he composed these three pieces, which he generally called The Sea Pieces: Waves, Chanty, At Sea. He was able to give a special tang in them, of these colder northern seas, for the music surely doesn’t bring to mind a type of tropical ocean. It is the sea of a Brittany, an Ireland, of the old-time sailors who settled the American Eastern Coast."

When the score of Poems of the Sea was published in 1923, Bloch added a verse from Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass as preface:

In cabin’d ships at sea,
The boundless blue on every side expanding,
With whistling winds and music of the waves, the large imperious waves,
Or some lone bark buoy’d on the dense marine.
Where joyous, full of faith, spreading white sails,
She cleaves the ether ’mid the sparkle and the foam of day, or under many a star at night,
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land, be read,
In full rapport at last.

—Dr. Richard E. Rodda