Whirlwind at the Lute

Last month, volatile little Composer Ernest Bloch gave Portland, Ore. music lovers his best advice on how to behave at a concert (TIME, March 7). "Don't be inhibited," he hollered happily from the podium, "I'm not!" In Manhattan last week daughter Suzanne Bloch was proving herself a chip off the old one.

Her raven locks floating down to shoulders of her Elizabethan-style dress, she swept on stage in Times Hall to give her audience her annual program of medieval and Renaissance music.

Correction for a Critic. Lute in lap, she began with Elizabethan airs like Lord Willoughbie's Welcome Home and Can She Excuse, sending the notes out soft and sweet. Then she tripped across stage to a tiny 16th Century virginal, and tinkled out two more. Before the program was over, one-woman-show Suzanne had also performed on three types of recorders, conducted a group of psalter singers and an ensemble, danced a bit and sung two of her own compositions. Wrote the New York Times's Ross Parmenter: "About the only thing she did not do ... was play the offstage drum in the Renaissance dance." Beamed Suzanne: "He was wrong; I did that too."

Blue-eyed Suzanne, a whirlwind of a woman at 41, finds time to teach a children's class at the Juilliard School of Music and another class for elementary-school teachers at City College. She keeps house for her husband Paul Smith, head of Columbia University's mathematics department (and recorder virtuoso in Suzanne's ensemble). And she raises her two sons. Says Suzanne: "It keeps me normal."

Suzanne learned to love medieval music as a child. Her famous father used to teach a choral group in lower Manhattan, take Suzanne along to substitute for missing singers. When she went to Germany in 1928 for more study, she visited family friend Physicist Albert Einstein, decided, after hearing Einstein's stepdaughter Margot play the lute, that that was for her.

Snort from Segovia. The lute wasn't easy to learn. Plenty of music has been written for the lute (more, Suzanne believes, than for the harpsichord), but she found it written in a complicated notation called "tablature." The instrument itself was a little complicated too. Famed Guitarist Andres Segovia visited Suzanne last year, took one look at her lute and snorted, "Too many strings" (her lute has 19, Segovia's guitar only six).

Now, although she admires the music and the men of the Middle Ages ("They had less plumbing, but they were more alive"), Suzanne is not above strumming cowboy songs on the lute for her seven-year-old son Anthony. One of her proudest accolades: recently, when she strummed for Anthony's pals at a party, they paraphrased the other critics: "You're O.K."

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