Racial traits abound in this body of work. These ponderous forms, these sudden movements, these imperious, barbaric, ritual trumpet blasts, bring to mind all one knows of Semitic art, recall the crowned winged bulls of the Assyrians as well as Flaubert's Carthage, with its pyramided temples and cisterns and neighing horses in the acropolis. Bloch's themes oftentimes have the subtle, far-flung, monotonous line of the synagogic chants. Many of his melodic bits, although pure inventions, are indubitably hereditary. The mode of a race is, after all, but the intensified inflection of its speech. And Bloch's melodic line, with its strange intervals, its occasional quarter notes, approximates curiously to the inflections of the Hebrew tongue. Like so much of the Gregorian chant, which it oftentimes recalls, one can conceive this music as part of the Temple service in Jerusalem. And like the melodic line, so, too, the phrases assigned to the trumpets in the setting of the three Psalms and in the symphony "Israel." They, also, might once have resounded through the courts of Herod's temple. The unusual accents, the unusual intervals, give the instruments a timbre at once imperious, barbaric, ritual. And how different from the theatric Orientalism of so many of the Russians are the crude dissonances of Bloch, the terrible consecutive fourths and fifths, the impetuous rhythms, savage and frenetic in their emphasis. This music is shrill and tawny and bitter with the desert. Its flavor is indeed new to European music. Certainly, in the province of the string quartet, nothing quite like the salty and acrid, the fruity, drugging savor of Bloch's work, has ever before appeared.