Lena Bloch and the Echo of Marina Tsvetaeva: A Dialogue Across Time
The project, commissioned by Chamber Music America, also mirrors Bloch’s own journey across borders. Born in Moscow, she emigrated first to Israel, then to Europe, where she performed for over a decade before settling in New York in 2008. There she quickly established herself as a distinctive voice in the city’s vibrant jazz scene. Her background, steeped in the musical languages of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Western classical tradition, shapes a sound world that is intellectually rich yet emotionally immediate.
Related:
1979: MUSIC VIEW
Is there a chamber music renaissance in America? Everybody says so, and nobody says it louder than Benjamin S. Dunham. Ben Dunham is the executive director of Chamber Music America, which was formed in 1977 and is trying to do for chamber music what the American Symphony Orchestra League has done for orchestras. Thus Mr. Dunham is not the most disinterested of observers. In way he has become the father figure — a very young father figure — of American chamber music, and with typical zeal he hurls figures, statistics, doctrine, interpretation and exegesis at his bemused listener.
…
The phenomenon, and it is a phenomenon, has been observed and is beginning to get financial support. Under the auspices of the National Endowment for the Arts, a $750,000 chamber music program for 1980‐81 is being combined with the New Music Performance Program. The details have not yet been worked out, but grants for chamber music up $20,000 will be provided on a one‐to‐one matching basis. It hoped that as much as $400,000 will be available.
National Endowment for the Arts
Hell, my ardent sisters, be assured,
Is where we’re bound; we’ll drink the pitch of hell—
We, who have sung the praises of the lord
With every fiber in us, every cell.We, who did not manage to devote
Our nights to spinning, did not bend and sway
Above a cradle—in a flimsy boat,
Wrapped in a mantle, we’re now borne away.Every morning, every day, we’d rise
And have the finest Chinese silks to wear;
And we’d strike up the songs of paradise
Around the campfire of a robbers’ lair,We, careless seamstresses (our seams all ran,
Whether we sewed or not)—yet we have been
Such dancers, we have played the pipes of Pan:
The world was ours, each one of us a queen.First, scarcely draped in tatters, and disheveled,
Then plaited with a starry diadem;
We’ve been in jails, at banquets we have reveled:
But the rewards of heaven, we’re lost to them,Lost in nights of starlight, in the garden
Where apple trees from paradise are found.
No, be assured, my gentle girls, my ardent
And lovely sisters, hell is where we’re bound.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 