Ernest Bloch wrote a considerable amount of music for string quartet under descriptive titles so that you would not necessarily know what medium the pieces were written for unless you heard them. In the Mountains is a 1925 diptych, its two movements meant to evoke, in the first instance, dusk falling over the peaks of the Haute Savoie near Geneva and, in the second instance, a folk dance somewhere in the Swiss Alps. Bloch, of course, was far from Switzerland and its mountains when he wrote the first of these two pieces in Cleveland and the second in Santa Fe, New Mexico (thanks to Jerry Dubins/Fanfare Magazine). Watch the Galatea Quartet perform  Ernest Bloch's In the Mountains . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Fallen Angel (1945) is a rarity among films noir, a picture that comes very close to capturing the slightly seedy, morally ambiguous tone of hardboiled writers like James M. Cain. It was conceived as a followup to the previous year's smash hit romantic mystery Laura, reuniting the director, one of the stars and even the celebrated composer David Raksin, who had jumped to national fame with his wistful theme for a portrait. (Glenn Erickson). Watch the opening of Otto Preminger's Fallen Angel with music by David Raksin . . . it's our PYTHEAS SIGHTING for the week.

An avid student of art and architecture, Lowell Liebermann has long been intrigued by the strange, ornate carvings called gargoyles, which embellish many old churches and palaces; often exceedingly bizarre in appearance, they were thought to help repel evil spirits. Demons seem to hover around Liebermann's own Gargoyles (1989), a set of four highly contrasted etudes, which maintains an eerieness and sense of mystery even in its more placid moments. The title is meant simply to characterize sharply drawn sketches of a florid and macabre nature, rather than to suggest any actual musical depiction of these ornamental grotesqueries (thanks to Michael Boriskin/New World Records). Listen to a performance of the first of Lowell Liebermann Gargoyles [no. 1] (1989) by pianists Timothy Durkovic . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.