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Ernest Bloch
Quintet No. 1 for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello

- Born July 24, 1880, in Geneva
- Died July 15, 1959, in Portland, Oregon
- Composed in 1921–23
- Duration: 33 minutes

In 1916, Ernest Bloch abandoned his position in his family’s touristy Swiss tchotchke shop to take up a job teaching music theory and composition at the recently founded Mannes School for Music in New York City. Between 1917 and 1920, he saw premieres of several important orchestral works, including his Three Jewish Poems (B. 36) and his cello concerto Schelomo (B. 39). When he landed a publishing contract with Schirmer, they added a special logo to editions of his scores: a six-pointed Star of David enclosing the composer’s initials, which explicitly tied together musical meanings and Bloch’s identity.

He didn’t see his Piano Quintet, which he completed in 1923 while living in Cleveland, as a specifically Jewish work. But he expressed a sense that his cultural background fed into all that he produced in an article from 1938 in Musica Hebraica: “[the] entire Jewish heritage moved me deeply; it was reborn in my music. To what extent it is Jewish or to what extent it is just Ernest Bloch, of that I know nothing. The future alone will decide.”

The very first notes of the opening movement of the quintet, played by the strings in unison, feature a unique mark: a forward-facing slash, meant to indicate that the pitch should be played a quarter-tone high. These figures produce a murmuring, swarming texture against which the piano calls out the primary melodic gestures of the piece. Here, Bloch’s quarter-tone use creates an agitated, blurred color, and doesn’t necessarily point to a grand expansion of the Western scale of 12 chromatic notes. But later, in an impressionistic transition passage in which the piano whirs away on low tremolos, the viola slides from a B to a burning B-quarter-flat, while the cello plays a hollow D harmonic. Bloch’s intention here is quite clear: to allow an alternate system of pitch to sit expressively in contrast to passages of dense chromatism and more outwardly tonal, triadic music.

The relationship between these three means of harmonic organization animates the remainder of this large work. The piano cannot, of course, play quarter tones, and so often the power of sections involving microtonality is in the audible difference between the note a string player finds and the even-tempered harmonic coloration of the keyboard. In the second movement, the piano holds down an unwavering triplet pattern. At a certain point, the strings start playing bursts of arpeggios over these triplets, resting on one note and then gliding down and up to that note repeatedly. In such moments, Bloch grinds against our sense that pitch, like the piano’s ostinato rhythm, is a constant. When more quarter tones emerge and the sense of pitch breaks down further, the piano loses its rhythmic stability in turn.

When he isn’t dipping his toes into 24-tone chromaticism, Bloch guides our ears through a confounding set of tonal and atonal passages. In the final movement, the themes introduced at the outset are narrow, chromatic, Bartókian explosions. There are places with little to no thematic material, just angular jumps or repetitive chirps marked to be played “like an exotic bird.” The music is set up so that we get used to crunchier chords; as a result, the brief moments of tonal respite, in which the melody is based on a simple scale or the harmony relies on triads, don’t provide the relief they normally would in the context of a tonal piece.

A pianist with whom Bloch worked on the quintet once complained that the culminating, C-major cadence in the final movement was out of place in such a tonally exploratory work. The composer patiently explained that “I could have written 200 different dissonances for that cadence, but the simplest and oldest is the only right one.” In this quintet, moments of harmonic clarity certainly serve to anchor the piece in a longer, tonal tradition. But they also, brilliantly, function the other way: Bloch’s colleague’s complaint speaks to how the work trains our ears to have a desire for denser harmonies, conflicting with our usual hope for a soothing sequence of tonics and dominants.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.

Ernest Bloch
Quintet No. 1 for Piano, Two Violins, Viola, and Cello

- Born July 24, 1880, in Geneva
- Died July 15, 1959, in Portland, Oregon
- Composed in 1921–23
- Duration: 33 minutes

In 1916, Ernest Bloch abandoned his position in his family’s touristy Swiss tchotchke shop to take up a job teaching music theory and composition at the recently founded Mannes School for Music in New York City. Between 1917 and 1920, he saw premieres of several important orchestral works, including his Three Jewish Poems (B. 36) and his cello concerto Schelomo (B. 39). When he landed a publishing contract with Schirmer, they added a special logo to editions of his scores: a six-pointed Star of David enclosing the composer’s initials, which explicitly tied together musical meanings and Bloch’s identity.

He didn’t see his Piano Quintet, which he completed in 1923 while living in Cleveland, as a specifically Jewish work. But he expressed a sense that his cultural background fed into all that he produced in an article from 1938 in Musica Hebraica: “[the] entire Jewish heritage moved me deeply; it was reborn in my music. To what extent it is Jewish or to what extent it is just Ernest Bloch, of that I know nothing. The future alone will decide.”

The very first notes of the opening movement of the quintet, played by the strings in unison, feature a unique mark: a forward-facing slash, meant to indicate that the pitch should be played a quarter-tone high. These figures produce a murmuring, swarming texture against which the piano calls out the primary melodic gestures of the piece. Here, Bloch’s quarter-tone use creates an agitated, blurred color, and doesn’t necessarily point to a grand expansion of the Western scale of 12 chromatic notes. But later, in an impressionistic transition passage in which the piano whirs away on low tremolos, the viola slides from a B to a burning B-quarter-flat, while the cello plays a hollow D harmonic. Bloch’s intention here is quite clear: to allow an alternate system of pitch to sit expressively in contrast to passages of dense chromatism and more outwardly tonal, triadic music.

The relationship between these three means of harmonic organization animates the remainder of this large work. The piano cannot, of course, play quarter tones, and so often the power of sections involving microtonality is in the audible difference between the note a string player finds and the even-tempered harmonic coloration of the keyboard. In the second movement, the piano holds down an unwavering triplet pattern. At a certain point, the strings start playing bursts of arpeggios over these triplets, resting on one note and then gliding down and up to that note repeatedly. In such moments, Bloch grinds against our sense that pitch, like the piano’s ostinato rhythm, is a constant. When more quarter tones emerge and the sense of pitch breaks down further, the piano loses its rhythmic stability in turn.

When he isn’t dipping his toes into 24-tone chromaticism, Bloch guides our ears through a confounding set of tonal and atonal passages. In the final movement, the themes introduced at the outset are narrow, chromatic, Bartókian explosions. There are places with little to no thematic material, just angular jumps or repetitive chirps marked to be played “like an exotic bird.” The music is set up so that we get used to crunchier chords; as a result, the brief moments of tonal respite, in which the melody is based on a simple scale or the harmony relies on triads, don’t provide the relief they normally would in the context of a tonal piece.

A pianist with whom Bloch worked on the quintet once complained that the culminating, C-major cadence in the final movement was out of place in such a tonally exploratory work. The composer patiently explained that “I could have written 200 different dissonances for that cadence, but the simplest and oldest is the only right one.” In this quintet, moments of harmonic clarity certainly serve to anchor the piece in a longer, tonal tradition. But they also, brilliantly, function the other way: Bloch’s colleague’s complaint speaks to how the work trains our ears to have a desire for denser harmonies, conflicting with our usual hope for a soothing sequence of tonics and dominants.

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.