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He had the chance to study with the celebrated Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe in the Brussels Conservatory. After some moves in Europe he settled in the United Statesin 1916 and took American citizenship in 1924.
As a teacher he had some illustrious students, among them: George Antheil, Frederick Jacobi, Bernard Rogers, and Roger Sessions.
He was the first Musical Director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music, and later he was director of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music until 1950.
In 1941 Bloch moved to the small coastal community of Agate Beach, Oregon and lived there the rest of his life.
He died in 1959 in Portland, Oregon, of cancer at the age of 78. The Bloch Memorial has been moved from near his house in Agate Beach to a more prominent location at the Newport Performing Arts Center in Newport, Oregon.
He has managed to mix the French impressionism with the Germanic school of Richard Strauss in his early works, including his opera Macbeth, 1910.
His best known pieces of his mature period draw on Jewish liturgical and folk music as well as Jewish culture in general. These works include Schelomo (1916) for cello and orchestra, which he dedicated to the cellist Alexandre Barjansky, the Israel Symphony (1916), Baal Shem for violin and piano (1923, he later arranged it for violin and orchestra), The Jewish Life Suite for Cello and Piano and Avodath Hakodesh (Sacred Service, 1933) for baritone, choir and orchestra which can be considered a ``Jewish Requiem'' in the tradition of Mozart and Brahms even though the Judaism does not have anything like a Christian Requiem as a religious music or service.
Other pieces from this period include a violin concerto written for Joseph Szigeti and the rhapsody America for chorus and orchestra.
His composition of the last period, after World War II, are a little more varied in style, though Bloch's essentially Romantic idiom remains, somewhat like a mixture of Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy. The Jewish theme remains such as in the Suite hébraïque (1950), some other works, like the Second Concerto Grosso (1952), display an interest in neo-classicism (though here too the harmonic language is basically Romantic, even though the form is Baroque). The late string quartets include elements of atonality.
He was and educated and prolific photographer as well. The Western Jewish History Center, of the Judah L. Magnes Museum, in Berkeley, California has a small collection of photographs of Ernest Bloch which document his interest in photography.
Many of the photographs Bloch took, over 6,000 negatives and 2,000 prints, are in the Ernest Bloch Archive at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of Arizona in Tucson along with photographs by the likes of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston and Richard Avedon.