Читать книгу The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor - Judah M. Cohen - Страница 10
ОглавлениеIntroduction: A Moment of Transformation
[W]hen my turn came, standing in front of [the President of Hebrew Union College] … and lookin’ in [his] eyes, and when he said [“Are you up to the task of this?”] to me, and I just kept nodding like: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” I felt certain about it.…
There was something transcendent about the whole experience … I think it will really stay with me. I mean I was thinking: “Not everybody can be clergy. You are privileged. This is a real honor.” And I remember thinking: “Yeah, graduate and undergraduate … graduation was special. But this, this is something different.… This is a transformation.”
—D. Yomtov, May 22, 2000
Sunday morning, May 21, 2000. The huge expanse of the sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El of the City of New York provided a grand resonating space for the pipe organ that signaled the start of the academic procession. From a curtained loft hidden high above the pulpit, a choir of students and faculty from the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music began to sing. And then, on cue, the graduating class of rabbinic and cantorial students from the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion processed in from the back of the sanctuary. “Baruch HaBa B’Shem Adonai,” the choir intoned in a setting by British composer Stephen Glass: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God!” Families and friends of the graduates stood in the pews on either side of the processional aisle, watching as the black-robed graduates strode toward the pulpit. Instructors and honored guests followed, several in full academic regalia. As they marched, the organist progressed through a succession of majestic compositions by both Jewish and non-Jewish composers.1 Those officiating at the ceremony took their spots on the pulpit, while the graduates found seats in the front pews. When the procession finished, the organist found an appropriate place in the music to end, and slowed to a satisfying conclusion. The echoes trailed off.
From my place in the side balcony, I could differentiate between the degree candidates in each program with relative ease. Nearly all the twenty-eight rabbinic candidates had prayer shawls (tallitot) draped over their graduation robes, presumably to denote the spiritual gravity of their anticipated leadership positions. Of the ten cantorial candidates, in contrast, only three wore tallitot; the rest, to signify their completion of the Master of Sacred Music degree, wore pink master’s cowls.2 Such attire offered a symbolic window upon the students’ expectations as together they commenced a “Service of Ordination and Investiture,” the ritual by which they would gain official status as religious leaders in American Reform Judaism (Service 2000).
The service, led by rabbinic and cantorial faculty from Hebrew Union College, differed significantly from the standard Jewish prayer ritual. Instead of moving through the normative parts of the Jewish liturgy, those gathered progressed through a series of readings, addresses and musical selections, all based around the ceremony’s chosen theme of “Light.” Written specifically for the occasion by a designated committee from the graduating class, and issued in booklet form to the graduates and attendees, the service outlined an emotional ascent, leading the congregation on a spiritual journey that would broadcast and reinforce Hebrew Union College’s values while adding meaning to the graduates’ impending titles. Participants recited lines emphasizing their devotion to Jewish history and teachings, heard cantorial and choral music setting key religious texts, and listened to warm greetings from Reform Judaism’s national leadership.
Once the preliminary prayers ended, the graduates rose, turned around to face the congregation, and intoned a responsive reading thanking family, friends and teachers for their roles in helping them reach this day. The faculty of the Hebrew Union College, seated right behind the graduating candidates, symbolically accepted their students’ imminent transitions into colleagues by completing the reading, as they declared together: “Arise, shine, for your light has come” (Service 2000: 6). With all but the final step completed, the graduates resumed their seats in the pews, silent in anticipation. The President and spiritual leader of Hebrew Union College rose from his place on the pulpit, came to the front of the raised platform, briefly addressed the assembly on the meaning of the graduates’ new responsibilities, and then commenced the annual ritual of “Investiture and Ordination.”
The President, alone, walked toward the back of the pulpit, climbing several steps to reach an imposing and majestic holy ark—the holding place for the synagogue’s Torahs, and the spiritual center of the sanctuary. He slid open the doors to reveal a number of ornately dressed Torah scrolls in a brightly lit vertical compartment. He bowed his head in silence for about a minute. Then he turned and descended the steps, ready to commence.
The cantorial students received their spiritual sanction first. Rising from their seats as a group, the graduates prepared for investiture, a process titled intentionally to express both similarity to and difference from rabbinic ordination.3
Cantor Israel Goldstein, Director of the School of Sacred Music, came to the reader’s desk at the front of the pulpit. Using a formal and tradition-laden term for “cantor,” he ceremoniously presented to the President the members of the graduating cantorial class, “who are to be invested as chazanim in Israel.”4 Goldstein called the candidates up by name, one by one—first in Hebrew, then in English. As each mounted the steps on the right side of the pulpit, the organist began playing music specifically requested by the student. Their choices ranged from Franz Schubert’s “An die Musik” (1817) to a selection from Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service (1930-1933), to a setting of Czech composer Ilse Weber’s Holocaust-era song “Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt.” Wafting softly throughout the entire sanctuary, the music reflected an intensely personal sonic environment. Only the cantorial students, their teachers, and their close friends and relatives could understand the meaning of what might otherwise have been construed as generic background sound.
Once on the pulpit, each student walked over to the President, who in turn led him or her by the hand up the steps to face the open ark. When they arrived, the two turned to each other, and the President placed his hands on the student’s shoulders. A larger than life and deeply intimate moment unfolded: even with the entire congregation witnessing the proceedings, students recalled the moment afterward with little memory beyond their immediate surroundings. Standing as if in tableau, the President spoke softly to the candidate, his words masked by the organ music.
For about forty-five seconds, the President and student maintained their silhouetted pose; perhaps during this time the candidate would nod his or her head minutely. Then the President turned his hands upward, firmly but tenderly holding the base of the student’s head. After around half a minute, he leaned forward, touching foreheads with the candidate. About fifteen seconds later they broke the tableau and embraced. The President led the newly invested cantor back down the stairs, where Goldstein, waiting, gave the graduate a diploma and a warm handshake. The new cantor would cross to the left side of the pulpit and descend back down to the floor level as the next candidate came up.
Several students returned to their seats in tears. Others openly showed a mix of gravitas and revelation, dwelling in the spiritual moment. Several hugged each other upon returning to the pew, having reached the final stage of a long journey.
All had been transformed. Culminating at least four years of intense study, they had gained the right to call themselves invested cantors, with all the responsibilities the title entailed. Together they had been embraced by the College—and, by extension, the Reform movement—as official representatives of the musical traditions of the Jewish people.
At a reception held afterward in the basement of an Upper East Side synagogue, family, friends, former instructors and current cantorial students congratulated the new School of Sacred Music graduates, proudly calling them by their long-awaited title of “Cantor.” It was a sign of respect, admiration, and accomplishment.
In the following years, these new cantors would explore the meaning of their spiritual labors. They would use their training to lead religious services, instruct congregants, and perform pastoral duties at the synagogues and other organizations that employed them. They would also build reputations as authorities on Jewish music through local concert appearances, special synagogue presentations, and performances of original, Jewish-themed works. Throughout, they would address questions first introduced during their years at the School of Sacred Music: What did it mean to be a vessel of Jewish music, particularly in a society that, they frequently found, held different ideas about the sounds of Judaism than what they had learned? How did their training prepare them for careers as pastoral leaders within liberal Jewish life? And perhaps most significantly, What had they become after their time at the School of Sacred Music?
In this book, I intend to explore that musical becoming—the process by which students learned, internalized, and then assumed the knowledge and abilities necessary to become communal, recognized, musical authorities.
Ethnomusicologists have long looked to musical authorities as crucial sources for understanding musical cultures: they have studied with them, marking musical growth under their tutelage as key parts of the participant observation process; and they have often used the knowledge and opinions obtained from these authorities as lenses for evaluating broader questions of musical style, structure, and social activity. Yet despite their centrality to the concerns of ethnomusicology, musical authorities have received relatively little critical scrutiny as figures who themselves had to undergo their own forms of musical transformation. Fieldworkers treated them as idols of sorts: the faces of musical practice, active symbols of musical tradition (often in opposition to modernity, external political and financial influence, or commercialism), and gatekeepers of musical knowledge. Ethnomusicology’s major figures included them prominently in their conceptions of the field: Alan Merriam devoted an entire chapter of his seminal 1964 book The Anthropology of Music to establishing these authorities as “specialists” (1964: 123–144), and Mantle Hood, in his textbook The Ethnomusicologist, emphasized finding and working intensively with teachers as a first priority for fieldworkers (1982[1971]: 212, 230–246). Important as such interactions became to fostering cultural and musical understanding, however, they also created spaces of ethical ambivalence, particularly if the musical authority’s status came to be seen a cultural variable in itself. After all, according to what standards did a musical authority come into being in the first place? Questions of how such authorities gained their stature all too frequently fell outside a research project’s analytical frame, receiving at best anecdotal treatment, and taking a necessary back seat to inquiries about less sensitive (and potentially less self-undermining) areas of musical tradition and style.
In this book I aim to take a deeper look into the creation of musical authority by scrutinizing the process by which one such figure, the Reform Jewish cantor, gains identity and prestige. Musical leaders do not simply come into the world—they must undergo extensive periods of training and transformation to develop specialized skills, gain a social network, and fall in line with a sense of historical expectation, all while displaying the ability, the spiritual resolve, the personal tenacity, and the “talent” (or a similar intangible factor) to achieve some form of success. The process often requires those who seek authority to dwell in a state of vulnerability, where they can change their habits, their beliefs, their techniques and their philosophies on the whim of a comment in order to satisfy an instructor. Yet they must also make their own choices throughout, and take on challenges of increasing complexity. From the first identification of potential, to the opening stages of initiation, to entrance into an accepted educational framework, to rigorous and complex negotiations of identity, to successive tiers of achievement and skill, and finally to the completion of the training process, students enter into relationships with one or many instructors under the presumption that after sufficient time and practice, they will cross the threshold from disciples to colleagues. The path toward musical authority therefore involves not just a reciprocal commitment from other authorities, but also the students’ investment in an uncertain but hoped-for future.
The training process toward musical leadership thus outlines a broad spectrum of variables. Becoming a musical leader requires an individual to adopt some notion of a longstanding tradition; but it also requires student and teacher to mediate, refine, redefine, and challenge that tradition throughout a prolonged process of transformation. The centralized and esoteric nature of the training process keeps much of the tradition insulated from broader cultural activity and public opinion; musical leadership, however, also relies on a public trust built by meaningfully presenting that tradition to the broader community. Any changes to repertoire, technique, and style happen under the watch of accepted practitioners, and hold greater meaning than the practices of musical outsiders; yet musical outsiders have often compelled musical authorities to reconsider their aesthetic values to maintain relevance in their communities. As understandings of the tradition inevitably shift over time, the learning process and its associated collective of practitioners become key factors in keeping it specialized, distinct, and intact; and yet the learning process also brings new people, new ideas, and new forms of flexibility into the tradition.
Several scholars have addressed the complex subject of musical training and the attainment of musical authority. Benjamin Brinner, for instance, described the idea of attaining what he called “musical competence” as:
… individualized mastery of the array of interrelated skills and knowledge that is required of musicians within a particular tradition or musical community and is acquired and developed in response to and in accordance with the demands and possibilities of general and specific cultural, social and musical conditions. (Brinner 1995: 28; italics inverse of original)
Brinner, in exploring the components of musical authority, detailed a model for “knowing” music, denoting domains such as “sound quality” and “symbolic representation” as skills that required specific attention (40–41); he suggested ways by which musicians within a specialized culture achieved “individual competence” within a varied system (74–86); and he proposed a theory for “acquiring competence” that incorporated a wide range of skills based on “age, education, and association,” the latter of which he described as “the many forms of interpersonal contact that initially shape and continue to alter a musician’s knowledge” (110, 113). Brinner’s complex, comprehensive, and thought-provoking system combined accounts combed from other ethnomusicological studies with his own observations and interviews, while also recognizing the significant body of scholarship on music education (110–132). Yet the literature and his experience among Javanese gamelan musicians still led to a necessarily unfinished view of the process. Attaining musical competence, Brinner noted, required a great deal of time; and the varied ages of those who pursue it, and the multi-sited and multi-systemed nature of the learning process, made a truly comprehensive account difficult to document firsthand. Brinner’s caveats spoke to the limitations of ethnomusicological fieldwork, where projects tended more toward months-long snapshots of musical systems, and where extended, multi-year narratives often depend upon oral histories rather than continuous observation (110–111ff.). From within these limitations, however, Brinner extracted a textured, cross-cultural framework for understanding how musical specialists acquired their skills. His focus on the “progression and pace, processes and methods, agents, context, and means of acquisition” in musical training (115) offered an important structure for considering the sonic and social conditions by which people assumed musical roles in society.
Complementing Brinner’s ideas, Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s briefer study of Ethiopian Christian prayer leaders (däbtäras) offered perspectives on musical figures through a religious lens (Shelemay 1992). As Shelemay noted, däbtäras’ roles included musical ability as a defining skill, and local descriptions often pegged them as “musical” leaders; but däbtäras also served as examples of how “[t]he world and praxis of musicians often extend beyond musical performance into other realms” (1992: 256). Trained in churches and monasteries through repetitive memorization of text and chant patterns, däbtäras produced sound predominantly within a religious context. The däbtära’s status as religious musical authority, however, also allowed him to be a general officiant, and opened up additional spiritual opportunities such as healing ceremonies that went beyond purely musical training (254–56). Shelemay’s descriptions thus highlighted key issues about the way religious musical leaders integrated their sonic and spiritual responsibilities, particularly when seen from outside a strictly musical perspective.
Brinner and Shelemay moved the framework for understanding musical “becoming” from a predominantly socio-mechanical one to a more self-determined (or emic) transformational one, bringing technical and social development together with personal investment and phenomenology. Ethnomusicology has much to offer on this topic; but many of the most vibrant examples come from accounts of how researchers themselves became transformed through their musical experiences. Early ethnographers prided themselves in their efforts to see through the eyes of the people they studied, partly as way to reinforce an authoritarian point of view.5 By the 1950s, as ethnomusicology began to establish itself as an academic field in the United States, Mantle Hood and others promoted a somewhat less presumptuous version of this approach. Understanding a musical culture, in their eyes, meant encouraging students to experience a community’s music from within, often before embarking upon any other form of social research. Hood’s approach gave young fieldworkers the opportunity to acquire musical competence firsthand, while promoting facility in a “second musical language” as a form of currency within the discipline (1960). Students’ time with local instructors helped them understand more “authentic” forms of musical transmission; and upon their return from the field, the relationships they forged, combined with their musical experiences, would be so deep as to render them potential teachers of the tradition themselves. Institutions of higher education, perhaps inspired by Hood’s world music ensemble activities at UCLA, increasingly began hiring ethnomusicologists to lead performing groups in their specialty areas, likely as a way to enhance the international flavor of campus and community life (Trimillos 2004: 24–25).6 These activities positioned ethnomusicologists, at least in the public eye, as “ambassadors (or at least local consuls) for cultures to which they only equivocally belong” (Solís 2004: 12) and practitioners of the musical traditions they studied.
As musical ethnography began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s from a method based on “objective” reportage to a more reflexive form of expression, ethnomusicologists increasingly began to add personal thoughts and feelings about the fieldwork process into their publications.7 First person accounts would reinforce the subjectivity of the fieldworker’s “gaze” in portraying cultural activities. Ethnomusicologists, as a result, could no longer appear as a neutral presence in the communities they studied. Instead, increasing numbers of researchers portrayed themselves as actors in a more complex model of cultural interaction. Acquiring musical skill, in this light, became a site of ambivalence, striking directly at the ethnomusicologist’s sense of legitimacy as a representative of an “Other’s” musical culture.8
One of the most dramatic and effective attempts to document this ambivalence appeared in Michael Bakan’s stirring, nearly novelistic account of his own experiences as a student of Balinese gamelan beleganjur drumming (Bakan 1999: 279–333). In an extended narrative, Bakan described in detail his several month relationship with his drumming teacher, the educational models he and his teacher employed in imparting musical information, and the issues he faced as an American trying to internalize an art form far more commonly taught to other Balinese. What distinguished Bakan’s narrative from other similar descriptions of music learning in the literature (see, for example, Berliner 1979) was the intense scrutiny he placed upon the phenomenological process of becoming a beleganjur drummer. Amid all his ruminations and discussions of educational and cultural difference between himself and the Balinese, Bakan described continually improving at his craft—in fits and starts, and by working through several setbacks. The most substantial moments of realization, which he framed as “tuning-in experiences” (316), somehow stemmed from his practice and study, yet went beyond rational explanation. After a significant amount of build-up, Bakan’s narrative climaxed in a triumphant drumming session, which he called “A Transformative Moment” (323). “[F]or one brief moment, at least,” he noted,
I have been able to move to some deeper place; into the experience of a more profound musical awareness than I had known or known existed; to a musical realm where the technical, the precise, the well-wrought, the beautiful, have become something other than what they seemed: reflections and embodiments not of themselves, but of a deep commitment and trust, of a transformation into a communion where we do not remain what we were before. (328)
Just as with the cantorial students at the start of this chapter, Bakan had experienced his own moment of becoming. His transcendent moment provided an important turning point for him musically, socially, and academically, and could be seen as a key prerequisite for progress into professional life.9 Moreover, like the cantorial graduates, Bakan went on to assume several positions of leadership and creativity within his chosen musical culture—directing ensembles, writing compositions, and performing with other recognized musicians mainly in the United States—while also achieving recognition as a scholarly authority.
Bakan’s intimate insight into his own strivings for understanding and respect within a musical culture opens a valuable window into ethnomusicologists’ quests to explore and perhaps acquire a musical identity. Even more to the point, however, his account allows us to question how closely an ethnomusicologist’s project to comprehend a musical culture might parallel the musical journeys of the people they frame as cultural “insiders.” It is tempting, after reading Bakan’s account, to put up a mirror and ask how “insiders” themselves might experience musical training as a form of rigorous acculturation. Might they similarly approach the musical training process as a foreign one, but with the hopes of gaining a cultural intimacy they already see as their own? And to what end?
I bring these thoughts to my study of American Reform Jewish cantorial training, where those who aspire to enter the cantorate can be seen on different levels as both insiders and outsiders. In fashioning a project to achieve ethnographic depth in situ among a range of musical aspirants, however, I faced a challenge. Brinner (1995), Shelemay (1992), Berliner (1994), Scott DeVeaux (1997) and others based much of their detailed accounts of the musical learning process on interviews taken significantly after the actual time of professional training. While their resulting analyses offer important insights, they nonetheless allowed informants to embed their paths to competence within post-facto frameworks, using cursory images and fleeting descriptions.10 In what way, then, could I, a researcher with similar aims, create a more systematic and in-depth environment for exploring both personal and technical transformation as it happens—satisfactorily, without resorting to self-analysis?
My attempted solution involved conducting fieldwork where musical learning had become institutionalized—sites often described as “schools.” Brinner and others treat these sites as places of modernization or nationalization that complemented and postdated more “traditional” forms of musical learning (1995: 17, 20, 105–106). While conceding this point to a certain extent (I believe institutions symbolize modernity far better than they actually represent historical “progress”), I also found institutional frameworks to provide students with a heightened site for cultural transmission—a central, well-defined, and multi-layered space for exploring musical transformation both individually and collectively.11 The communal nature of institutionalized programs, which combined standardized courses of study with less rigorously programmed spaces for personal growth and discussion, created a rich, enduring site for exploring musical tradition—one that carried with it its own vocabulary, cultural referents, and group experiences. This kind of structure also offered opportunities for enculturation into a larger fellowship of practitioners, thus promoting continuous “insider” musical discussions well beyond the institution itself.
The institution as fieldsite may seem mundane to fieldworkers destined to spend their professional careers in similarly conceived academic environments (thus the oft-discussed issue of the fieldsite as “a journey away” [Amit 2000: 8]). Yet the institution’s deceptively conservative nature encompassed the very criteria Brinner found to be necessary in achieving a substantive study on attaining musical competence: a clearly bounded community, the perception of a consistent training process, and well-defined centers of activity. Bruno Nettl and Henry Kingsbury laid the foundation for this kind of study in their analyses of Western “Classical” music conservatories (Nettl 1995; Kingsbury 2001[1988]). Kingsbury, who situated his ethnography at the pseudonymous Eastern Metropolitan Conservatory of Music, offered an impassioned argument justifying the conservatory as a legitimate ethnographic fieldsite, an extension of classical anthropological fieldwork in the spirit of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Margaret Mead. Though not necessarily as “exotic” a locale as other fieldsites, he asserted, the conservatory nonetheless housed its own “cultural system,” rife with disputes and negotiations about aesthetic and social values (Kingsbury 2001[1988]: 9–13). Within this system, Kingsbury explored the importance of “talent” as a concept often used to predict the progress and eventual success of students. Nettl, who based his observations on fifty years’ experience with college music programs, expanded Kingsbury’s frame to explore other significant cultural practices of conservatory and college music department life—from the canonization of “great” figures in the tradition, to the tensions inherent among advocates of different music value systems, to questions of repertoire choice. Both studies detailed important aspects of the musical becoming process within an institutional setting. In doing so, however, they also focused primarily on cultural models defined predominantly by instructors and administrations. Student voices sounded occasionally throughout their discussions, but more in support of the institutional superculture than in trying to come to terms with their own personal transitions as musicians and people.
My study of the community associated with the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music—the official cantorial training institution of American Reform Judaism—also retains some interest in the structure of musical transmission. I attempt to use that structure, however, to address specific questions about the ways both the School and its students relate to history, ethnic and religious identity, and the relationship between music and spirituality. Students who entered the school did not face or participate in the same kind of internal competition inherent in Kingsbury’s conservatory. The direct relationship the School of Sacred Music held with its alumni, other Jewish religious leadership, and Reform Judaism’s religious constituents, created a significantly less contentious dynamic, as well as a sense of community different from the conservatory’s often scattered personal relationships and reputations.12 Cantorial students more often valued themselves based on what kind of cantor each would become, and how their personal choices during training would help or hinder their roles when facing the pragmatic musical tastes of a religious lay-population. The School of Sacred Music, following Shelemay’s example (1992), thus manifested qualities as a site of religious learning and transmission, as well as a place for acquiring knowledge of “Jewish” music—aspects not highlighted in the “Western music” narrative dominating studies of more “secular” music schools. Most importantly, however, the institutional structure served as a backdrop for meaningful interaction through which students, teachers, and administrators negotiated their own paths to musical competence.
At the heart of this study, then, lies identity in transition. What does it mean to become a cantor? What does it mean to see one’s self as a sacred vessel of Jewish music? The most recent edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, despite its twenty-nine volumes, includes no entry for “sacred music”; likewise, the New Grove’s “Jewish music” entry (Seroussi et al. 2001) backs away from Curt Sachs’s elegant but highly problematic 1957 definition of Jewish music as music “by Jews, for Jews, as Jews” (Bayer et al. 2007: 637).13 Emanuel Rubin and John Baron attempted to provide a “working definition” of Jewish music in 2006 as “music that serves Jewish purposes” (Rubin and Baron 2006: xxvi), carefully acknowledging the evasive, ever-changing nature of “Jewish” sound. From an academic perspective, these careful assessments implied, the idea of “Jewish music” resists imposed boundaries. Yet to cantors and others who see “sacred music” and “Jewish music” as forms of spiritual and cultural capital (including, to a surprising extent, the above scholars—who depend upon these boundaries for their livelihood), these concepts have become the basis of countless discussions, articles of communal scholarship, editorials, political conversations, and religious policies. The need to define the “Jewish” and the “sacred” in music provided a significant impetus for the School of Sacred Music’s existence in the first place, and remained a crucial element of its continued mission into the twenty-first century. Understanding the stakes in fostering, enforcing, and describing boundaries to music’s sacredness and Jewishness, as well as the methods by which cantorial students, teachers and administrators internalized those boundaries, will become central concerns of mine as I examine the process of attaining musical competence and cantorial investiture.
Tradition in Change
As matriculants into a Reform Jewish institution, cantorial students at the School of Sacred Music obtain their credentials, and represent Jewish musical tradition, within a religious movement predicated on change. In May 1999, a few months before I started my fieldwork, the Central Conference of American Rabbis (CCAR)—Reform Judaism’s rabbinic organization—ratified the movement’s fourth document of collective self-definition since 1885. Entitled “A Statement of Principles for Reform Judaism,” the document asserted in its preamble: “The great contribution of Reform Judaism is that it has enabled the Jewish people to introduce innovation while preserving tradition, to embrace diversity while asserting commonality, to affirm beliefs without rejecting those who doubt, and to bring faith to sacred texts without sacrificing critical scholarship” (“A Statement of Principles” 2000: 3). When the movement’s rabbinic journal officially published the Principles the following year, moreover, it supplemented the five-page document with ten essays outlining various levels of support or opposition, illustrating the intensely dialogic nature inherent in Reform Jewish identity. As Mark Bloom, one of the contributors to this issue, noted, the Principles seemed both to address and inspire the next round of “Reform Judaism’s endless quest to define itself” (Bloom 2000: 52).14
Cantors, who had no official role in crafting this document,15 nonetheless could relate to the conditions described therein. In line with a world perceived to be changing ever more rapidly, and as part of a movement that defined itself based on that change, cantors felt constant pressure to claim a collective place as the movement’s vessels of sacred sound. Yet even as the movement’s President (a rabbi) emphasized the importance of music to Reform Judaism’s twenty-first century worship initiatives (Kaplan 2003: 71), and movement publications highlighted the cantor’s “changing roles” (Schwartzman and Shochet 2000) or spoke of the emergence of a “new cantor” (Robinson 2003), cantors struggled to fulfill their self-defined charge in ways that met the movement’s expectations.16 Reform Jewish leadership increasingly supported the cantor’s status by using pluralistic phrases such as “rabbis, cantors, and educators” in their official addresses. Cantorial students and teachers, however, often saw in this support a pressure to compromise their own full sense of cantorial identity and conform to a more democratic perception of religious sound. While Reform Judaism tried to define itself, in other words, its cantors often felt the need to address their own concerns and ideas about what constituted “tradition” and “innovation” in order to preserve their own history and mission.
Maintaining a cantorial tradition while serving a “modern” (or even, in some views, postmodern) Jewish population presented important questions about the relationship of music to personal identity, particularly if those congregations represented their own distinct line of religious musical discourse. Mark Slobin’s assertion that, “the existence of the cantorate has helped anchor American Jewry by providing a highly traditional institution that could act as a shock absorber for social and cultural change” certainly reflected values instilled in cantorial training (1989: 283). Yet laypeople, rabbinic leadership, and much of the scholarly community implicitly challenged that position by bundling music into their attempts to characterize recent shifts within American Jewish identity (Cohen and Eisen 2000: 169–170), belief, and religious/ritual practice (Hoffman 1999, Ochs 2007). Reform synagogues at the turn of the twenty-first century actively engaged in well-funded national initiatives such as Synagogue 200017 and Synagogue Transformation and Renewal (STAR), which claimed grounding in social science, placed great rhetorical value on music, and openly invited cantors as important participants—but not ultimate authorities—in congregation-wide conversations about musical transformation. For cantors, these developments demonstrated the complexity of their responsibilities: remaining true to the past and to repertoire that served as their legacy; remaining true to their self-described roles as synagogue musical leaders; keeping their value as musical authorities to their congregants; and all while addressing vocabularies of prayer and music that emerged from outside their inherited ideas of Jewish tradition. The taught reality of the cantor as the musical representative of Judaism thus remained constantly vulnerable and in flux.
The cantorial school, in this view, served as a strategic site for assessing and reconsidering the meaning of musical authority. Christopher Waterman, in addressing questions of musical tradition, has noted that “the temptation to read contemporary categories into the past, especially when authoritative scholarly sources and informants do it as a matter of course, is strong” (Waterman 1990: 369, emphasis in original). Cantors, a well-constructed category within organized liberal Judaism’s religious consciousness, benefited from that temptation: both as the communal voice of “tradition,” and as recognized members of what Reform Judaism described as “the clergy team.” Yet that category needed constant reconstruction based on contemporary ideologies of Jewish sound. In this respect, cantorial training existed as one side of a dialogue: What did a cantor need to have—and what skills and repertoire did the cantor need to acquire—to remain a voice of tradition to Reform Jews? This question would resonate throughout my fieldwork, in various sites across the movement, and most intensely among the developing cantorial students themselves.
Mapping the Cantorate
Cantorial training starts with the premise of travel: to become spiritual representatives of the Jewish people, cantors must first experience a sense of Jewish geography and history. The setting of Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music therefore offers a fascinating interpretation of both the spirit and intention of George Marcus and Michael Fischer’s call for multilocale (or multi-site) ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 91). Existing primarily in two locations (at the Hebrew Union College campuses in Jerusalem and New York) the School integrates its activities through an overall organizational schema that assigns each location a role in the cantorial enculturation process. Students applied to the School with an understanding that they would spend their first year of study in Jerusalem, and then complete their training in New York. By linking these sites as intimate components of the educational process, the School of Sacred Music cultivated a dual appearance as both a small, enclosed, centralized community and as a spiritual approximation of the Jewish diaspora. These complementary visions provided an elegant and bounded institutional model that benefited from postmodern theoretical interpretations of transnationalism and compressed space and time.
During approximately three years of fieldwork in these two sites, the bulk of which took place between August 1999 and May 2002, I found myself conducting a form of cognitive multi-site ethnography as well. While I explored each physical location, I found my interactions with members of the community falling along four general modes of perception, depending upon the situation.
I made efforts first and foremost to establish myself as a graduate field researcher. Beginning with a letter of introduction to the School’s director, which led to approval of my project, this role helped me fulfill my own needs as a student in pursuit of the Ph.D. As I continued my fieldwork, my perspective as a trainee took on additional dimensions. On one hand, my student status and compatible age caused many students to see me as a peer. At the same time, I would sometimes use my “academic” persona to maintain a sense of critical distance from the other students while in classes; and several would watch bemusedly as I hurriedly took down notes during discussions, set up audio equipment, and meticulously explained my motivations in response to their questions. Over time, some students even assisted me by recounting situations they found particularly relevant to my research. My research presence also offered students and faculty a deeper view of ethnomusicology, which the School openly embraced as part of its academic agenda: the School’s ethnomusicologist on faculty (who also became a close friend and advisor during my fieldwork) initially introduced me to various instructors and students with a good-humored remark that “there’s more than one Jewish ethnomusicologist in the world.” These kinds of situations provided me a position within the School that “allowed” me to conduct research as I had been trained to do without causing a stir. The relative compatibility of my identity with categories of knowledge propagated at the School evinced both the School’s familiarity with the Western academic system, and the students’ comfort with that system’s educational process.
By January 2000, due to my continual presence in cantorial classes and the concurrent lack of tenors enrolled at the School, students began to invite me to participate in School exercises and student musical projects. These instances, combined with my knowledge of Reform Jewish liturgy and similarities in age and financial situation, helped me gain an identity as a marginal student within the program. By the end of the year, students publicly told me, “you really are one of us,” and many expressed to me their hope that I would apply to the School formally. After participating in several public choral concerts with the School’s students and faculty, moreover, some audience members unfamiliar with my status occasionally came up to me afterward to ask what year of the program I was in. This context allowed me to gain insight into the everyday issues students faced, including frustrations with the program and personal concerns that arose with faculty and other students. Interestingly, my marginal student status also allowed me to build trusting friendships with the students that, I believe, allowed them to understand me better as I shifted between my roles as participant and “academic” observer.
In April 2000, in an unrelated development, the School’s ethnomusicologist invited me to teach a cantorial school course on American Jewish Music during his sabbatical. I agreed, with my dissertation advisor’s consent, in part because it corresponded with my own already established academic status in the School. This third role introduced me to an administrative perspective of the School I otherwise would have never seen. In practice, it occasionally proved surreal: the lessons I learned organizing and teaching my first graduate-level class served both as professional development and as research material; and the students I taught and graded also served as my research associates (and a couple of these openly told me they decided to take the course because they “liked” me). Moreover, after a year and a half of viewing myself from the perspective of a student and an outsider, I found myself treated by the administration as a junior faculty member. Those whose graces I had depended upon for permission to conduct research at the School in the first place, and whom I had learned to revere through the my experiences as a marginal student, would sit around the table at faculty meetings addressing me as a (rather unnerved) colleague and including me in their conversations and administrative decisions.18
My relationship with the School also existed in a fourth, more personal dimension. In March 1999, five months before I began field research at the School of Sacred Music and just after my dissertation proposal received its approval, I became engaged to the daughter of a well-regarded Hebrew Union College professor who taught at the New York campus. Through this association, I also gained a familial connection to the institution I intended to study. One of the cantorial faculty joked with me later that my engagement serendipitously granted me and my work a degree of “protektsia” (a Hebrew term denoting fortuitous political connections). This relationship became even more pronounced when a number of students and administrators began to identify me as this professor’s “son-in-law.” While I do not know for certain the effects of this relationship on my research, I often suspected its precipitous timing smoothed my entry into the community somewhat, and perhaps set certain suspicions at bay regarding my sincerity and the nature of my project.
Thus, in a very short time, I gained perspectives in my research as an academic outsider, a marginal student, an adjunct faculty member, and a faculty relative—in essence, conducting research from four different and equally rich points of view. Though I constantly needed to negotiate my shifting identity carefully while in the field, I found that adopting a modicum of open flexibility allowed me to experience a much more vibrant and textured understanding of the School’s policies, values and practices than had I maintained only one “role.” Fieldwork, in my view, benefits from cultivating honest relationships in a mutual spirit of open inquiry. It is by its nature a messy process, but one that in its messiness opens up important realms of understanding.
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I proceed, then, by exploring the meaning and process of becoming a musical authority through the lens of Reform Jewish cantorial training at the turn of the twenty-first century. In order to set the stage and create a historical structure within which the ethnographic account can take place, I offer in chapter 1 some background on the role of the cantor, as well as a chronicle of the historical forces that led to the rise of Jewish cantorial schools after World War II. While my trajectory will highlight the establishment of the School of Sacred Music, the people, ideas, and organizations I mention also served important roles in creating the Conservative movement’s Cantors Institute and Yeshiva University’s Belz School of Music. Later cantorial programs, such as those established at the Academy for Jewish Religion (in Riverdale, N.Y. [1992]), the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College (Philadelphia [1998]), and Hebrew College (Newton, MA [2005]), have also followed in this mold.
Embarking on cantorial studies requires more than just interest: it also requires readiness and an interest in being taught. In chapter 2 I draw from students’ own accounts to discuss the process by which they decided to pursue the cantorate as a career choice. As with musical figures in other cultures, those wishing to attain musical leadership must satisfy certain criteria imposed by established practitioners in order to gain admittance to training. In the case of Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music, such criteria appear in published admissions requirements that themselves reflect the School’s value system. The School’s faculty consequently admit or deny applicants based not only on musical ability, but also on the students’ perceived potential to adhere successfully to the most crucial cultural, musical and religious norms of the Reform cantorate.19
Students accepted into the School then commence an intense and rigorous training program, in this case via a systematic and progressive multi-year curriculum. In chapter 3 I provide a wide-ranging overview of this program in the form of a “roadmap” toward investiture: introducing the method and taxonomy by which students internalized relevant issues of professional musical competence. As cantorial students, aspirants had to learn how to chant from biblical texts, evaluate and learn repertoire, and understand the meaning of becoming Reform Jewish clergy among many other things. By successfully completing the curriculum, they earn the opportunity to explore their roles within the larger religious ecology of Reform Judaism.
Chapter 4 begins the heart of the study by introducing and describing the phenomenon of the “synagogue practicum.” An activity required of all second- and third-year students that generally entailed presenting assigned sections of religious rituals, the Practicum officially exists outside the regular classroom curriculum. Nonetheless, it holds great significance to both students and faculty, and serves as a platform for airing many of the major aesthetic, theoretical and practical issues faced by the cantorial students throughout their program. Using the Practicum as a lens, then, I will continue into chapters 5 and 6 by delineating several of these issues: how cantors define and classify their repertoire; how they clarify the production of cantorial “sound”; how the School of Sacred Music serves as a site for preserving and propagating cantorial memory; and how gender, and especially women’s voices, factors into perceptions about cantorial repertoire and technique. Through the discussions in these chapters, I hope to offer insight into the ways aesthetics and aural practices come to be understood as “cantorial” through the values propagated at the School, as well as explore how the School has dealt with change over the past decades to “update” the cantorate while maintaining its continuity with tradition.
I conclude by returning to my starting point: the cantorial investment ceremony. At each cantorial student’s moment of transformation, he or she becomes the full embodiment of cantorial history, sound, and knowledge, emerging as a public representative of a cantorial culture. “Investment,” I thus intend to show, signifies a multi-layered shift in identity. Through an analysis of these layers, I illustrate the depth to which investment/investiture recontextualizes a cantorial student-turned-cantor within the cultural world of Reform Judaism, and subsequently paves the way for a continued, and continually negotiated, embodiment of the cantorial figure. This last discussion revisits broad questions about the dynamic between identity formation, authority, and musical practice, in order to address discourses on the meaning of religious music, musical change, the relationship between music, modernity, institutionalization, and the meaning of becoming a musical leader from both inside and out.
The process of achieving musical competence, I suggest here, plays a crucial role in examining how a society negotiates its own musical values. Not merely the reception of a monolithic, unchanging tradition, the process comprises a nexus of social, musical, and personal pressures, all of which both reinforce and threaten to destabilize a constructed status quo—a sense of tradition. Leaders-in-training, to become a part of that tradition, must negotiate between their own needs, the authority of their teachers, and the boundaries of the social and organizational entities they strive to join. These musical religious figures, and their deeply complex pathways and decisions en route to musical authority, provide the voices by which their cantorate, and this book, have come to exist.
A Note on Nusach
Over the course of this study, the term nusach will appear in a number of different contexts. A variable concept, nusach roughly describes a relationship between music or melody and liturgical text.
Etymologies of the word change drastically based on setting and intended usage. In 1933, for example, German Cantor Reuben Moses Eschwege derived nusach from Biblical usages that, he argued, described “something removed [i.e., written down] from what has existed [presumably in oral tradition].” Eschwege reinforced his etymology by linking the word to an analogous Aramaic term (nus’cha) that, he claimed, meant “copy” (Eschwege 1996–97 [1933]: 42). At the School of Sacred Music, meanwhile, I heard two other etymologies: the first, derived from the modern Hebrew word for “formula” or “pattern,” corresponded to an idea of nusach as a series of idiomatic melodic fragments sewn into a single musical “fabric”; and the second etymology framed nusach as emerging from the Hebrew word for “fixed,” emphasizing the consistent and idiomatic nature of the aforementioned fragments.
Jewish music scholars have found the term similarly slippery. Hanoch Avenary’s attempts at distilling a definition for the Encyclopedia Judaica (1971) offered merely a starting point for understanding the phenomenon: distinguishing between “general” usage, and more “technical” usage denoting the “specific musical mode to which a certain part of the liturgy is sung.” While well-mapped, however, Avenary lacked bibliographic support, and relied in part on anecdotal evidence (especially for “general” usage).
Eric Werner avoided using the term nusach altogether, preferring instead to approach the relationship between sound and text in Central and Eastern European Jewish prayer though the concept of Minhag Ashkenaz (the “Central [and later Eastern] European practice”) (Werner 1976: 1). Even in the absence of the term, however, cantors have interpreted Werner’s concept as an equivalent to nusach, and used his ideas accordingly. Werner closely related Minhag Ashkenaz to liturgical developments over the history of Ashkenazic Jewry (which he dates back to the Middle Ages), and structured his book to deal with what he considered a taxonomy of the style’s distinct components. In ascending order of “complexity,” he recognized: “Plain Psalmody,” “Ornate Psalmody,” “Plain Response,” “Refrain,” “Antiphony,” “Free melismatic recitative,” “Missinai Tunes and Chants,” “Pure melismatic chant,” “Cantillation of scriptural texts” and “Cantorial fantasia.” Taking an approach that combined anecdote and assumption with historical research, Werner explored this system primarily with an eye toward fleshing out a grand narrative of the “tradition.” His discussions, however, based on an overall conception of stylistic “authenticity,” often led Werner to criticize current practice for its lack of historical awareness. This agenda led the book to become an insider discourse in itself, more a prescriptive device for understanding nusach than a descriptive one.
More recent ethnomusicology studies have made inroads into exploring the “insider” understandings of nusach. Mark Slobin also found nusach to be a vague term that served well as a point of cantorial discussion, yet eluded musicological analysis (Slobin 1989: 256–279). After producing several quotes on the subject of nusach, Slobin wrote:
… the foregoing quotations suggest nusach is involved in everything from hiring through youth relations, viewed as anything from a discipline gracefully accepted to a hindrance proudly rejected. Nusach is simultaneously musical and political. It is learned, but it might be “absorbed.” Nusach should automatically tell you what season it is, yet performing “traditional nusach” can mean “cleaning up” and “reducing” a famous teacher’s approach, as long as the “soul” is kept. Meanwhile, the real master of nusach may not even be the hazzan—the artist—but the “ordinary” ba’al tefillah, perhaps just a volunteer prayer leader. Finally, as background it is very much worth noting that nusach originated as a textual, not a musical term, and that it might imply much more than either text or tune: “way of life.”
The only point of agreement is that nusach is the emblem of tradition and that it somehow specifies, stipulates, or situates a musical moment, perhaps in a particular locale (Slobin 1989: 260).
Slobin attempted to investigate nusach quasi-historically by analyzing collected variants on two chant selections. While suggesting that the process of chanting nusach reflected a historical “core concept” in Eastern-European cantorial “tradition,” he also noted the lack of historical material for comparison, and ended up framing his analysis as representing “truly a cross section of today’s [cantorial] professionals” (272; emphasis added).
Jeffrey Summit followed Slobin by exploring nusach as an indicator of religious identity in five contrasting contemporary Jewish communities throughout the Boston area (Summit 2000: 105–127, see also Summit 2006). Through interviews with both congregants and religious leaders, he portrayed nusach as a decentered “folk” term of sorts, used by individuals as an entry point into numerous dimensions of Jewish identity. Summit suggested: “contemporary conceptions of nusach are bound up in these Jews’ struggles with modernity and efforts to clarify and assert their religious and cultural identity” (127). His approach, like Slobin’s, effectively mapped out the term’s varied landscape among a wide range of Jewish communities within a single location.
Nusach, these studies show, holds a meaning and emphasis that shifts depending upon the context. I therefore will focus on presenting the concept as it came up in situ at the School of Sacred Music, usually in relation to other closely associated concepts (such as “modes” and “Traditional repertoire”), rather than try to isolate these instances into a chapter of their own. By presenting the idea in its many forms, I hope to emphasize the richness of nusach as an insider term: a hovering presence within the cantorial program that helps bring together imperfectly corresponding musical concepts under a common, if ambivalent, rubric.
The issues of nusach in this environment provide a classic illustration of the nexus between “insider” and “mainstream” academic discourses. Although students strived to become vessels of Jewish musical tradition, they also expected to become music scholars in the Jewish world, learning research and analysis techniques analogous to those used by Slobin, Summit, and myself. Invested in nusach for professional purposes, they had to discern how nusach fit within the cantorial culture; and they experienced nusach through a number of means, including articulated Western musical analyses, practical, imitation-based methods, performance, and less easily rationalized ideological discussions. The School thus became both a site for exploring nusach, and, through its students and curriculum, an extension of the academic studies already undertaken in this field.
