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the stark northern light and cloud shadows of a mythical Nordic landscape. The way in which a land is lived on and cared for contributes to its atmosphere. The lagoons of Rahway in New Jersey, while preternatural, are occluded by the orphic addition of skyways, smokestacks, clandestine taverns, and strange underworld rumors. The sculptures at Tippet Rise add a triangulation to the land, where music and the nature of the land itself form a synthesis of shapes and moods to produce unexplained angles of light, pyrotechnics out of the earth.
Sculpture is a kind of poem, where industrial and sophisticated forms, resonant with the history of their discipline, also contain a mysterious empathy with the outdoors. When they are placed in nature, they unwind, the way sunlight unwinds from a log in a fireplace, to wrap the air in deeper sounds, in strange shadows, in unspoken words that conjure up lost planets and mystical kingdoms.
Bloch’s strange sound world makes extreme timbral demands of a violinist, and requires a performer adept in disciplines other than mere technique.
ERNEST BLOCH
Sonata for Violin and Piano No. 2, Poème mystique
Bloch was aware that audiences were bewildered by his first sonata, and that he needed to get his message across in more traditional and spiritual ways. Bloch felt this single-move- ment sonata was “the world as it should be: the world of which we dream; a world full of idealism, faith, fervor, hope, where Jewish themes go side by side with the Credo and the Gloria of the Gregorian Chant.”
The composition of the Poème mystique was triggered by a dream that Bloch had after a mild overdose of Veronal, following a period of intense crisis and illness.
The “Kyrie fons bonitatis” (All Hail, Fount of Goodness) used by Bloch is the second variant of the Kyriale (the Ordinary of the Mass in Gregorian Chant), intended to be used on high holy days such as the Epiphany (the visit of the Magi to the Christ Child), the Ascension into Heaven (40 days after Easter Sunday), and Pentecost (49 days after Easter, when the Holy Ghost descends upon the Apostles; this is the day the Catholic Church was founded). Bloch is stating that Christianity and Judaism are alike at their deepest levels. Some of the melodies are Celtic, and much of the music is incantatory, rhapsodic, and transcendent: a musical epiphany.
The language is the sentimental one of the much later Korngold Violin Concerto from 1945. Bloch himself influenced film scores for decades: this is the music
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The Music at Tippet Rise