Poems of the Sea

• Ernest Bloch began work on this piano cycle in 1920, during a visit to the village of Percé on the Gaspé Peninsula in Quebec. He began sketching these pieces after a boat ride to Bonaventure Island.¹
• Bloch completed this set in 1922. The original work is scored for piano, and Bloch also orchestrated it.²
• Bloch’s score is prefaced with a quotation from Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman. 

“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 
By sailors young and old haply will I, a reminiscence of the land be read,
In full rapport at last.” 

Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass³

Movements 

1. Waves 
2. Chanty 
3. At Sea⁴

1. Suzanne Bloch, liner notes to Bloch: Piano Works, Vol. 1, István Kassai, Naxos 8.223288, CD, 1991.
2. David Z. Kushner, “Bloch, Ernest,” Grove Music Online (2001), accessed April 22, 2022, https://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/grovemusic/view/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.001.0001/omo-9781561592630-e-0000003287.
3. Ernest Bloch, Poems of the Sea: A Cycle of Three Pieces for Piano(New York: G. Schirmer, 1923), 2.
4. Ibid., 1.