Ernest Bloch

As well as producing musical scores, Bloch had an academic career that culminated in his recognition as Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Berkeley in 1952.

He studied music at the conservatory in Brussels, where his teachers included the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe.

He then traveled around Europe, moving to Germany (where he studied composition from 1900 to 1901 with Iwan Knorr at the Hoch Conservatory in Frankfurt), on to Paris in 1903 and back to Geneva before settling in the United States in 1916, taking US citizenship in 1924.

In 1919 the San Francisco Symphony gave two of the earliest performances of his Schelomo, receiving high praise from multiple critics.

He had previously been encouraged to come to San Francisco by Alfred Hertz and Temple Emanu El cantor Reuben Rinder.

This once-common practice was usually undertaken to create a memento or portrait of the deceased, but it is unusual for an immediate family member to make the death mask.

The Center for Creative Photography and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music each have a copy of Bloch's death mask.

If some of his works evoke the atmosphere of the Old Testament, they also operate elsewhere with equally telling and totally different effect; the Gauguinesque South Seas in the slow movement of the first Quintet, and China [in the last of the] Four Episodes are examples.

Suzanne Bloch, born in 1907, was a musician particularly interested in Renaissance music who taught harpsichord, lute and composition at the Juilliard School in New York.

The Western Jewish History Center,[13] of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, in Berkeley, California, has a small collection of photographs taken by Ernest Bloch which document his interest in photography.

[16] The snapshots have been donated to the Archivio audiovisivo di Capriasca e Val Colla by the Associazione ricerche musicali nella Svizzera italiana.