Suzanne Bloch was a Swiss-American musician and an influential pioneer of Early Music Revival during the 20th century.

Biography

Suzanne Bloch was born in Geneva in 1907 into the family of composer Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch

Ernst Bloch was a German Marxist philosopher.Bloch was influenced by both Hegel and Marx and, as he always confessed, by novelist Karl May. He was also interested in music and art . He established friendships with Georg Lukács, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill and Theodor W. Adorno...

. The family moved to New York in 1906 when Ernst Bloch took on teaching and conducting responsibilities there. She went to Paris to study music with Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger

Nadia Boulanger was a French composer, conductor and teacher who taught many composers and performers of the 20th century.From a musical family, she achieved early honours as a student at the Paris Conservatoire, but believing that her talent as a composer was inferior to that of her younger...

 in 1925, and decided to become a lute

Lute

Lute can refer generally to any plucked string instrument with a neck and a deep round back, or more specifically to an instrument from the family of European lutes....

 player after hearing an early-music concert. She went on to study music in Paris and Berlin, and she met Arnold Dolmetsch

Arnold Dolmetsch

Arnold Dolmetsch , was a French-born musician and instrument maker who spent much of his working life in England and established an instrument-making workshop in Haslemere, Surrey...

 in England in 1933. Dolmetsch sold her a lute from 1600 that he had restored himself. In 1935 she performed at the Hazelmere Festival in England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

, and soon afterward returned to New York, where she began her concert career.

Here career as a lutenist was cut short in 1950's by repetitive stress syndrome brought on by the modern heavily built Hermann Hauser

Hermann Hauser

Hermann Maria Hauser, CBE FREng FinstP CPhys , is an entrepreneur who was born in Vienna, Austria but is primarily associated with Silicon Fen in England....

 lutes that she played, but her condition allowed her to continue to play early keyboards and sing. She was one of the founding members of the Lute Society of America in the 1970's.

Family

Suzanne Bloch marriage to ?.Smith ended in divorce. She raised their autistic son alone, and was able to help him gain nearly total social functionality through self-designed art therapy. He eventually became an independent artist-painter.