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To Fashion a Cantor

For 2000 years, the cantor has served as the Jewish people’s prayer leader before God, as composer of liturgical poetry and song, and as educator and communal leader. Today, the cantor is part of a professional synagogue team working to enhance Jewish life.… As a calling and a career, the cantorate continues “to wed the worlds of spirit and art”—the mission for which the School of Sacred Music prepares its students.

—Publicity Brochure for the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion School of Sacred Music, c. 1999

As framed by the School of Sacred Music, the figure of the cantor at the start of the twenty-first century served as a force for maintaining Jewish religious musical traditions, and a powerful public symbol of Jewish religious continuity. This portrait, cultivated since the mid-late-nineteenth century, originally emerged as part of a trend toward scientific precision within Central and Eastern European Jewish scholarship. Cantors and other researchers, compiling over two millennia of written and spiritual sources, progressively distilled a cantorial figure from a wide array of titles, responsibilities, and musical concepts. Their work not only gave the cantor an identity, but also established a historical, social, musical, and religious space for discussing “Jewish” liturgical sound. At the twentieth century’s end, therefore, cantors increasingly saw themselves as figures both in history and of history. Through both publicity and action, they claimed on one hand an age-old embodiment of artistic sound within Jewish worship, and on the other hand a means for preserving and propagating that sound within contemporary society.

Before delving into the meaning of becoming a cantor within Reform Judaism, I will chronicle the layers of communal knowledge and activity into which the cantor has come to dwell. When combined, these layers establish a platform for creating the “modern” cantor, ultimately supporting the intentions and ambitions of the School of Sacred Music’s founders in the 1940s, and continuing to shape the meaning of the cantorate ever since. During the time of my research, these well-defined contours of cantorial scholarship provided an ethnohistorical and religious framework for anchoring emerging cantorial identity.

The idea of “Jewish history,” as David Biale has argued, implies a quest for a unified narrative—one that somehow threads together a varied and far-flung series of populations and cultural practices across space and time (Biale 2002: xxiii–xxiv). To consolidate these communities through a common set of religious beliefs, ideologies, experiences, or genetic traits requires a great deal of nuance and imagination. Yet people have sought a common “Jewish” past and sense of experience for scholarly, personal, political, communal, and religious purposes. The cantorial narrative offers one example of this process, and illustrates the tensions involved in bringing together Jewish identity and history. Recent scholarly accounts have linked the cantorial figure over time to several different occupations (both amateur and professional), numerous leadership responsibilities and activities (religious or otherwise), many forms of knowledge and talent (not always musical), broad interpretations of moral leadership, and several types of musical aesthetics and repertoire. Combined and recombined in different ways depending upon the author and context, these broad attributes created a variable narrative inscribing the cantor with historical depth and an intimate knowledge of a Jewish sonic “essence.” The School of Sacred Music’s own publicity pamphlet, for example, began by promoting the figure it intended to produce as a link between ancient and modern Jewish life: at once a spiritual representative and a wage-earner, a member of the clergy and an artist, a figure for the ages and a figurehead for today. How and why the School brings these two thousand years of “cantorial” activity to the charge of the modern cantor offers insight into the ways a “usable past” (Roskies 1996) became the impetus for a useful, and perhaps forward-seeking, present.

Constructing the Cantor: The Pre-Modern Layers

Researchers trying to construct cantorial practices before the eighteenth century often had to conflate linguistic and cultural history, tracing words or concepts perceived as connected with the cantor across canonical Jewish texts. These texts, which largely comprised legal interpretive works written by religious authorities, claimed linear descent from the Torah (The Five Books of Moses): including the Mishnah (Judea, c. 200 CE), the Talmud (Israel/Babylonia, c. 500 CE), The Guide for the Perplexed (Cairo, Moses Maimonides, 1185–1190 CE), the Shulchan Aruch (Venice, Joseph Caro, 1565) and numerous subsidiary writings. Using references from these sources led researchers to a unique, albeit slanted, composite narrative that gave a broad context for exploring cantorial religious norms, social roles, and cultural values. These sources’ status as a foundation for much contemporary Jewish religious life, moreover, gave them additional capital as “definitive” parts of the Jewish historical narrative.

Twentieth-century scholars wishing to describe the “origins” of the cantorate typically framed their discussion around two terms: chazan¹ and shaliach tzibbur. As Max Schlesinger noted in 1904, Talmudic references to these terms appeared to describe ambiguous “communal officials” (or “servants”) who may have performed Jewish sacred rituals, but carried no explicitly musical responsibilities (Schlesinger 1904). Liturgist Ismar Elbogen later destabilized even these early mentions by suggesting they may have resulted from later modifications inserted by copyists (Elbogen 1941: 17–18). Regardless of the obscurity and variation such references presented, however, scholars seeking a cantorial lineage found the sheer presence of chazan and shaliach tzibbur in early canonical works enough to establish a retrospective linguistic anchor for a continuous cantorial history.

From these beginnings, scholars subsequently pieced together several versions of a “rise of the cantor” narrative. Abraham Z. Idelsohn, for example, devoted an entire chapter to the cantor’s emergence in his landmark 1929 book Jewish Music in Its Historical Development. Idelsohn’s interpretation of cantor-related terms started with the shaliach tzibbur as a non-musical maintenance worker whose title eventually changed to chazan; at that point, Idelsohn claimed, the chazan began to gain musical associations, and eventually developed into a musical precentor (Idelsohn 1992 [1929]b: 101–109). Hyman Kublin, in 1971, took a somewhat different tack by claiming that although the chazan and shaliach tzibbur described separate figures, chazanim (pl.) eventually became de facto occupiers of shaliach tzibbur positions by the Middle Ages (Kublin 1971); Hyman Sky, in a much more extensive study, came up with similar findings (1992). Mark Slobin, in the late 1980s, provided his own nuance to the discussion, supplementing Idelsohn’s schema by outlining social and liturgical factors that might have led to the “invention of the hazzan” at the start of the seventh century. Emphasizing the philological tradition from which such approaches emerged, Slobin marked the convergence of function and title by suggesting that at that time, “[t]he term hazzan itself was ready for specialization” (Slobin 1989: 5).

Inscribing the cantor as a specifically musical figure also allowed scholars to link cantorial identity with specialized musical repertoires. Kublin, for example, used such logic to explain how a word characterizing the modern cantorial repertoire—chazanut—emerged from an early poetic form specifically associated with chazanim:

When piyyutim [paraliturgical poems/lyrics] began to take an important place in the liturgy of the synagogue [c. 6th century CE], it was the hazzan who would recite them and provide suitable melodies. Some of the paytanim [liturgical poets] themselves were hazzanim [pl.]. The recitation of piyyutim was called hizana … by the Arabic-speaking paytanim and the Hebrew equivalent hazzanut … came to refer to the traditional form of chanting the whole service, and later to the profession of cantor also. (Kublin 1971: n.p.)²

In other cases, scholars characterized the premodern cantor as a figure devoted to preserving and presenting musical repertoires with similarly long but ambiguous histories. To Gershon Appel, for example, the medieval cantor served as a defender against changes to the nusach tradition—an argument based on Appel’s interpretation of the writings of fourteenth/fifteenth-century rabbinic sage Maharil (Jacob ben Moses Moelin, c. 1365–1427), “who was himself a renowned hazzan” (Appel 1979–1980: 7). Scholars’ attempts to bring musical, social, and intellectual processes into a coherent early history of the cantor thus relied on the careful arrangement of a fragmented and scattered series of canonical references. Their efforts gave the cantorate the historical and liturgical weight necessary for presaging its emergence into the modern world.

Layers of Modern Identity

In recounting cantorial history from the around the eighteenth century forward, scholarship relied on significantly different forms of evidence, due largely to political changes allowing Jews greater franchise in their respective governments and social environments (a process often called Emancipation; see for example J. Katz 1973). Descriptions of the cantor beginning in this period derived less from Jewish legal codes than from sources considered standard evidence to European musicologists: musical scores, letters, minute books, eyewitness accounts, and periodicals of both Jewish and non-Jewish interest. Nineteenth-century attempts among Jewish intellectuals to emulate more mainstream forms of scholarship, moreover, spurred Jewish music researchers in Central and Eastern Europe to fashion a methodology compatible with mainstream music research. Scholars’ changing approaches to Jewish musical discourse, coupled with the rising prestige of Western music literacy among Jewish composers and musicians, readjusted the parameters for describing and exploring the modern cantorial figure.

Most significant in the shifting scholarly discussions about the cantorate was the narrowing focus on the cantor as an Ashkenazic (Central and Eastern European) Jewish figure—in no small part because the mainly Ashkenazic scholars, as well as much of the emancipated Jewish community, saw their liturgical music as an important means of connecting to Western classical and Christian liturgical music traditions. Twentieth-century chroniclers of the cantorate often took pains to separate the Ashkenazim and their cantorial practices from the liturgical music practices of the Sephardim (“Spanish” or “Oriental” Jews), sometimes under the justification that Sephardic musicianship represented a less “developed” aesthetic of a people stalled in exotic pre-modernity. Both Idelsohn and later cantorial chronicler Leo Landman (1973), for example, offered substantive descriptions of the Sephardic cantorate through the sixteenth century in their historical reconstructions, yet shifted their attention almost exclusively to the Ashkenazic population from the seventeenth century onward. Idelsohn characterized this shift as the passing of an artistic mantle from a waning Sephardic culture to an increasingly vital Ashkenazic culture—an interpretation similar to other triumphalist Ashkenazic-centric interpretations of the day (Gerber 1995: 12). “In the phlegmatic Orient,” Idelsohn noted, “the Synagogue song of the Sephardic-Oriental communities remained stagnant in the last three centuries.… leaving their attempts to be continued by the youngest and strongest of all Jewish groups—the Ashkenazim” (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 128; emphasis in original). In the 1970s, musicologist Eric Werner brought the Ashkenazic centrality of modern Jewish music history to a new height, devoting an entire book to the Ashkenazic synagogue song tradition under the premise that Ashkenazic chant, particularly as propagated by its cantorate, represented Judaism’s greatest musical achievements (Werner 1976). By phasing non-European Jewish forms out of the modern cantorial trajectory, Ashkenazic scholars in a predominantly Ashkenazic world thus “naturalized” the figure into a reflection of their own worldviews and experiences.

Within the Ashkenazic realm of cantorial singing, however, a narrower dichotomy emerged, roughly distinguished between East and West (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 246–315; see also Bohlman 2005: esp. 17, 22–23). Adhering to contemporary theoretical constructs, late nineteenth and early twentieth century researchers viewed the East as a seat of “purer” traditional Jewish expression, dominated by a more fervent religiosity and a penchant for oral tradition (Isenberg 2005, esp. 97–104). In this environment, itinerant boy singers learned cantorial repertoire through multiple apprenticeships to other cantors, and from there embarked upon their own independent careers. Eastern cantors thus came to represent a more authentic musical style and way of life, made more powerful by the region’s perceived inherent musicality. According to Geoffrey Goldberg, instructors at Central European cantorial academies in the mid-nineteenth century valued Eastern European-born cantorial students over others due to their more intimate knowledge base of Jewish liturgy and sound (Goldberg 2000: 32). Eastern cantors’ very presence in Central European Jewish musical society, it seems, comforted anxieties about the perceived attenuation of Jewish tradition in the West.

The “Western” sphere of the cantorate, influenced in part by Emancipation and in part by the newly emerging Reform movement, took upon itself the onus of bringing “traditional” music into a more mainstream socio-cultural milieu. While the East remained the source of tradition, Jewish music personnel in the West employed standardized modes of notation and instruction: they composed and harmonized in parallel with Western art music norms, presented their compositions in a “modern” synagogue setting that often included an organ and choir, and trained according to state-sanctioned rules for musical instruction. Viennese cantor/composer Salomon Sulzer—credited in many accounts as the first person to incorporate the title of Oberkantor into the Jewish world—became a paradigm for this approach (Dombrowski 1991). While reportedly criticized for his “innovations” to Viennese Jewish ritual (which included advocacy of the organ and the implementation of choral music [Frühauf 2003: 77–82]), Sulzer nonetheless received historical approbation by Idelsohn and others for bringing the Jewish religious service into a new era and raising it to a high artistic state. Other cantors from large cities, such as Samuel Naumbourg (1817–1880, Paris), Hirsch Weintraub (1811–1882, Königsberg), Israel Mombach (1813–1880, London), and Abraham J. Lichtenstein (1806–1880, Berlin), followed suit with their own compositions and/or collaborations with local composers. Although detractors initially resisted this musical as overly assimilatory, Idelsohn by the early twentieth century had accepted such music as part of the synagogue canon, asserting that it maintained a noticeable difference from other Western musical styles. “Sulzer did not KNOW what Jewish music was,” Idelsohn suggested, “but he did instinctively feel or he deduced the fact from the general character of Jewish traditional tunes that the manner of Jewish musical expression was a different one from that of the German” (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 254–255). Over the course of time, these cantor/composers would gain credit as translators of the Jewish musical “tradition” into the modern world, an effort preserved through their publications.³

From the perspective of the cantorial narrative, Central and Western Europe gained its greatest fame as a transparent vessel for bringing an Eastern sense of “tradition” into a Western musical aesthetic (Bohlman 2008: 95–103). Central and Western European Jewish communities developed a series of cantorial training programs (Lehrerseminare) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that regularized the training of cantors according to a curriculum-based system. The proliferation of publications and teaching materials that came to accompany these academies documented the importance of notation in this environment, and illustrated continued interest in instructing cantorial students in Eastern European styles (often in relation to Western styles) (Goldberg 2000). Even while systematizing and modernizing the cantorate in the West, therefore, cantorial training continued to look to the East as a major aesthetic wellspring.

A massive migration of Eastern European Jews across the Atlantic starting in the 1880s brought both parts of the East/West dichotomy together in the United States. In this new frontier, where German Jewish communities had already established themselves, the figure of the cantor would retain its Eastern European image. As in Central and Western Europe, however, cantors would look to the trappings of the West to improve their musical and social prestige.

The American Cantorate

Scholars aiming to recount the history of the cantorate in the United States face a dilemma of conflicting narratives. The supposed constancy of the cantor in Jewish history applies pressure to construct an American cantorial history along accepted lines of American Jewish history (as chronicled, for example, by Jonathan Sarna [2004] and Hasia Diner [2004])—starting with the arrival of Jews in New Amsterdam in 1654. At the same time, however, the very images and sounds American Jews popularly associated with the cantor’s presence in Jewish life at the turn of the twenty-first century derived from a largely different trajectory: one, as just described, based on cultural forms fostered in Eastern Europe that came with Eastern European immigrants to the United States. To reconcile these two narratives, scholars again appealed to etymological archeology: trying to find key terms, this time in American Jewish historical sources, that approximated Jewish religious musical activity. The resulting histories blunted contradictions between these narratives in order to recount the rise of a “modern” musical figure on American soil.

Idelsohn (1992[1929]a: 316–336) and (more completely) Slobin based their American cantorial narratives on occurrences of the term “chazan.” Before the 1840s, however—when Sephardim from Central and Western Europe comprised the best organized Jewish populations in the Americas—this lineage proved semantically questionable (see esp. Slobin 1989: 29–50).⁴ While a figure called the chazan existed in America during this time, Jewish communities tended to treat him as a learned individual; other studies suggest that the figure’s musical prowess held less importance than his abilities to deliver sermons, lead congregational prayer, and solemnize Jewish lifecycle events (Cohen 2004: 23, 58, 66). Slobin tacitly acknowledged the problems involved in tracing the nineteenth-century American cantor by bringing alternate titles into his narrative, including “reader,” “Reverend,” and “minister” (Slobin 1989: 32, 35, 37, inter alia); and he justified his use of these terms by noting that “each generation of Jewish-Americans has its own understanding of what we are calling the hazzan” (Slobin 1989: 31). Nonetheless, Slobin’s and others’ histories shaped a perspective on cantorial culture that retroactively reencoded the cantorial narrative into early American Judaism, and paralleled attempts by major cantorial organizations to assert the cantor’s longstanding status in American Jewish life.⁵

The Ashkenazic cultural hegemony of scholarly cantorial history comes into particular relief after 1880. The period spanning approximately 1880–1940, often viewed in recent literature as the “Golden Age” of the cantorate (see, for example, Pasternak & Schall 1991), portrays the profession as reaching its artistic apex—and, just as importantly, coming almost exclusively from the Eastern European cantorate. Samuel Vigoda, in his account of the early part of this era, quietly pointed to New York as successor to the major eighteenth-to-twentieth century European cantorial centers such as Berditchev, Odessa, Kishniev, Vilna (Vilnius) and Warsaw (Vigoda 1981: 579–580). Even contemporary American accounts of this era, such as Idelsohn’s, acknowledged the continuation and popularity of “the style of the Eastern European chazzanuth” in America as presented by immigrant cantors (Idelsohn, 1992[1929]a: 334–335). These cantorial figures, their cultural milieu, and the “style” of chazanut they practiced (seen contemporaneously as many different styles) would eventually establish the standards for cantorial training programs in the mid-twentieth century.

Several factors may have contributed to the codification of Eastern European practices as “representative” of chazanut in its totality. Most noticeable was the demographic factor: the roughly two million Jews who immigrated to the United States from Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924 dwarfed existing Sephardic and German Jewish populations in America and ostensibly relandscaped American Judaism. As a result, Ashkenazic cultural practices became largely synonymous with American “Jewish” culture, most notably during attempts to revive “Jewish” forms of artistic expression in the 1960s and 1970s (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2002). The Eastern European immigrant cantor, meanwhile, already memorialized in the landmark 1927 film The Jazz Singer (and re-memorialized in remakes of the film in 1954 and 1980), came to represent Judaism by its very ubiquity within Jewish liturgical culture. And the centrality of New York City as a site where a number of regional cantorial “styles” homogenized into an overall “Eastern European style” due to competition and coexistence among the large number of cantors may have played an important role as well.⁶

Perhaps the most important factor establishing this period as an artistic high point for the cantorate, however, was the creation of durable recordings and films that would serve as longstanding reminders of the period’s “star” culture. The most prominent cantors, in addition to intoning services in the New York area’s most illustrious synagogues,⁷ be came the subject of considerable attention as arbiters of highbrow “ethnic” culture. Cantors such as Mordecai Hershman and Josef (“Yossele”) Rosenblatt gained great fame and fortune by concertizing in major venues around the world (see, for example, Rosenblatt 1954: 152–188, 234–251). No longer confined solely to the Jewish community, they began to emerge as “Jewish” analogs of opera stars such as Enrico Caruso; several even added opera arias to their programs (see Slobin 1989: 59–60; Rosenblatt 1954: 140–151).⁸ A number of cantors also committed their vocal performances to recordings (and, less commonly, film) for mass distribution (Sapoznik 1994; Shandler 2009: 16–39);⁹ as I will explain in a later chapter, transcriptions of these recorded concert-version pieces would eventually become a central part of the cantorial school repertoire. Together, these developments led to a well-documented scene that quickly grew into a repository of memory, and a touchstone of practice.

Idelsohn noted in a critical commentary that concerts and (especially) recordings appeared to solidify an idiomatic “cantorial” sound culture spanning from the synagogue to the public sphere:

[The most famous cantors] gained their reputation and popularity not only because of their achievements in the Synagogue, but also because of their vocal performances in the concert house, and notably because of their phonograph records. By the latter means, they have popularized (and at times also vulgarized) the Synagogue song. Their strength lies in their rendition of the Synagogue modes in unrhythmical improvised form, with accompaniment likewise improvised, on piano or string-instrument. With respect to improvisation, these Orthodox chazzanim are in this country the only protagonists of the traditional Jewish-Oriental song. However, none of them have thus far created music of any originality. They continue to sing in the style of the Eastern European chazzanuth, and some of them, in order to attract the public, do not hesitate to sing arias of opera and musical selections of dubious sources set to prayers, as was customary among the chazzanim in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. (Idelsohn 1992[1929]a: 334–335)

World War II and the tragedy of the Holocaust emphatically closed the door on the Golden Age, and transformed these critiques;¹⁰ the era’s link to the recently obliterated “Old World” suddenly appeared to elevate its status to a nostalgic high point of Jewish creativity.¹¹ The cantorial figure embodied the connection to a lost culture for many American Jews, and consequently seemed to create its own argument for preservation.¹² Cantorial imagery and historical discourse thus became the basis for building a “new” cantorial culture in the United States. To continue the tradition, however, adherents of the cantorial culture needed to create a new sense of modernity to fit their trajectory of cantorial history. Their discussions would forge a path for adopting and installing the cantorial narrative into contemporary American Jewish culture.

The Rise of the American Cantorial School

The American cantorial school rose on the crest of both a revival and a reevaluation of the cantor in the postwar era. Placing standards of cantorial knowledge and ability within a curricular framework, these schools attempted to improve the cantor’s religious standing, regularize the cantor’s repertoire and training, and, most immediately, “fill the gap left by the Nazi destruction of the European centers of Jewish sacred music” (Blumenfeld 1951: 51).¹³

As Geoffrey Goldberg has described, cantorial training institutions known as Lehrerseminare had existed in Central Europe from the nineteenth through the first half of the twentieth century (2000). Created in reaction to newly imposed state-sponsored criteria for regulating teacher education (under which cantors qualified), the Lehrerseminare brought candidates through a multi-year, progressive series of classes culminating in the conferral of a recognized cantorial status. These earlier cantorial schools, Goldberg notes, maintained a philosophy and curriculum remarkably similar to what the School of Sacred Music would use decades later; they differed only in that their courses of study often emphasized practical skills over scholarship. Attrition eventually weakened these schools in the early part of the twentieth century, and the Nazis silenced whatever remained.

Nonetheless, when the first promising signs for creating a Jewish music institute dawned in the United States, the Lehrerseminar model appeared to enter the discussion in concept if not in precedent. Communal memories of the Lehrerseminare barely registered in American conversations. Yet the methodology associated with Central and Western European schooling remained, perhaps because many of the School’s key founders themselves came from Central Europe. The tradition they aimed to preserve remained focused in Eastern Europe; the vessels by which the tradition would take root in America, however, maintained an academic (predominantly German) structure. And the whole operation, ultimately fueled by the upheavals of World War II and its consequent destruction of European Jewish culture, would carry the impression of a sudden newness with it.

Interest in establishing American institutions for cantorial instruction had existed decades before the initiative that led to the School of Sacred Music. In 1904 a segment of the Jewish Ministers Cantors Association—the most prominent consortium of cantors in the United States at the time—used the organization’s annual gathering to call for the founding of a New York-based “school for cantors” (Moses 1904, cited in Levin 1997: 739).¹⁴ Lacking satisfactory progress, the group renewed its call in 1924, decrying the dearth of standards and professional security for its members (The history of hazanuth 1924: Foreword). This and other cantorial initiatives, however, never succeeded in realizing ambitions for a sustainable school, ultimately due to a lack of funds and interest (Levin 1997: 739–744). The actions that led to the School of Sacred Music instead emerged from a different sector: a consortium of Jewish music composers and scholars that included cantors but did not focus solely on their interests. Nurturing a plan from the late 1930s, these individuals mobilized less out of concern with the cantor’s lot per se than what they saw as the decline of American Jewish music more generally.

What would become the School of Sacred Music started out as a relatively amorphous call for a school devoted to “Jewish” music, first from the Jewish music advocacy group Mailamm (The American-Israeli Institute for the Study of Music [1932–1939]; see Heskes 1997) and later from the Jewish Music Forum (1939–1944), the organization that replaced it. Both New York-based groups hoped an educational institution would restore prestige and intellectual prowess to the Jewish musical arts, particularly as Jewish communities in Europe increasingly lost their footing under the Nazi regime. On Tuesday evening, June 20, 1944, the Jewish Music Forum brought these concerns to the top of its agenda by holding a symposium entitled “The Need for an Academy of Jewish Music.” Prominent Jewish composer Isadore Freed began the meeting by bemoaning the European destruction of the most “authentic” centers of Jewish music, and called for a distinctly American institution devoted to cultivating what remained of these traditions (Freed 1944). Other presenters followed, offering plans for “Training a Jewish Musicologist,” creating a “Curriculum for Jewish Composers and Performers,” and theorizing “The Academy’s Place in Jewish Religious Life.” Park Avenue Synagogue Cantor David Putterman, who delivered this last talk, spoke specifically to the future of cantorial culture. “No profession,” he said of the cantorate, “has ever achieved stature and recognition until a duly established University, Academy or Seminary graduated qualified students with accredited degrees and titles” (Putterman 1944: 23).¹⁵ Putterman’s vision of the school ensured that the United States could continue to turn out “qualified Hazanim” (22) at a time when the future of the Eastern European cantorate looked bleak. By evening’s end, the participants appeared convinced of their charge, and “unanimously adopted” a resolution to create a commission devoted to realizing the academy.

Soon after the symposium, Hebrew Union College musicologist Eric Werner, who had sent a letter of support to the Jewish Music Forum symposium in absentia, apparently circulated a “Memorandum Re Organization For Liturgical Music of Judaism” to several influential individuals at his institution.¹⁶ In the preliminary feeler, he outlined a plan for creating a “Central Institute for the liturgical music of Judaism” devoted to “(a) familiariz[ing] the layman with the best traditions of the Synagogue in the realm of music; [and] (b) [maintaining] permanently the scientific study of our liturgical music.” The Cincinnati campus of Hebrew Union College, he floated, would provide an ideal site “to carry the drive for a renaissance of Jewish Music”: located far away from the Jewish communal politics he found distracting in New York City, the campus also held the world’s largest collection of European Jewish music manuscripts.¹⁷ Werner’s arguments seemed to impact positively upon the Board of Governors of the Hebrew Union College, for in early 1945 the body gave its sponsorship to an “organization meeting” for a proposed “Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music.”¹⁸ Representatives from across the American Jewish religious spectrum received invitations, including faculty from Hebrew Union College (Reform), the Jewish Theological Seminary (Conservative), and Yeshiva University (Modern Orthodox), as well as Cantor Putterman.¹⁹ While many could not attend the December meeting in Cincinnati due to travel or weather issues, those present reinforced the points discussed at the earlier symposium. “Traditional” Jewish liturgical music had reached a “corrupted,” atomized state in contemporary America, and needed both standardization and improvement on all levels and in all religious denominations. Through a concerted effort on the part of major American Jewish organizations, a new “American” style of Jewish music could emerge that adhered to a deep sense of “tradition” and Jewish identity yet exhibited a high level of creativity and currency. Establishing a Jewish music academy, the attendees asserted, remained a crucial component of this plan.

The Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music (SAJLM) began in earnest as a New York-based organization in early 1946. Though publicly professing the Jewish universalist ideals of k’lal yisrael (the implication that Jews shared a sense of common responsibility), the group’s support came largely from the Reform movement and Hebrew Union College, which contributed over three quarters of the Society’s 1947 budget.²⁰ The latent denominationalism that accompanied this lopsided support created problems for most of the Society’s activities, especially in the attempts to establish a Jewish music school. The Modern Orthodox movement, represented by Yeshiva University, seemed to reject the school plan immediately. Conservative Judaism, through the Jewish Theological Seminary, eventually begged off from the plan and publicly made alternate arrangements to start its own music school.²¹ Even negotiations for a joint school with the New York Cantors Association appeared to fall through.²² The Reform movement thus found itself poised to adopt the transdenominational project as its own, despite the SAJLM’s increasing isolation within the Jewish communal world.

Sometime before 1948, Eric Werner appealed to Hebrew Union College to proceed with plans to authorize the founding of a music school unilaterally, under the confidence that “every one of the well-known musicians of the SAJLM would be eager to cooperate with the HUC, especially Rabbi [Israel] Goldfarb, Prof. [Abraham Wolf] Binder, Prof. [Jacob] Weinberg, [and] Dr. [Isadore] Freed, from all of whom I have received written assurances indicating that they would be in favor of such an independent school.”²³ After additional negotiation, Werner obtained a commitment from Hebrew Union College, and subsequently the permission of the SAJLM board, to accept the College as the School’s sole sponsor. Werner then submitted a formal proposal for creating the school to the Hebrew Union College Board of Governors.

Werner’s proposal unequivocally placed cantorial education at the center of the projected institute, though with a focus on a figure called the “cantor-educator.” A new figure for the Reform movement (which had relied heavily upon an organ/choir model for worship music until that point), the cantor-educator under Werner’s plan received a new identity as a modern musical authority, and a vessel for enhancing synagogue music according to the ideals promoted by the SAJLM. Werner, in his proposal, argued for the “definite need and demand for trained cantors, choirleaders, and organists which will sharply increase over the next five years.” The cantor-educator role, furthermore, could solve synagogue personnel problems by filling music and religious education leadership needs at the same time. With a minimal financial risk, and an opportunity to engage some of the nation’s most prominent Jewish synagogue musicians (before other denominations acted on their own plans), the school could become a revivifying force if HUC acted promptly. “We certainly shall be blamed,” Werner added, “for not having foreseen that beginning shortage of personnel and having failed in doing our share in preserving the last remnants of the once glorious tradition of European Synagogue music.”²⁴

On February 1, 1948, the Hebrew Union College Board of Governors approved Werner’s proposal and officially began preparations for inaugurating a New York-based School of Sacred Music that fall. Werner followed his word and started to hire faculty from the SAJLM board, engaging them to teach a curriculum that included cantillation, “Traditional Melodies,” “Harmony,” and “Nusach and Hazanut,” “Elementary Liturgy,” “Eastern European Folk Music,” and “Choral Singing and Coaching.” Notably, only one of the new faculty, Gershon Ephros, identified as a bona fide cantor, suggesting a philosophy that placed the responsibility for Jewish musical renewal squarely into scholarly hands. These educators and their courses (plus a “Choral Singing and Coaching Course” taught by Binder) would constitute the course of study for the School’s first year of instruction.

Werner and the prospective School’s appointed Dean, Dr. Abraham Franzblau, acted further to legitimize the School’s status on general religious, musical, and academic fronts. Franzblau began the process of obtaining an official charter for the School from the Board of Regents of the State of New York.²⁵ Werner, meanwhile, conducted “negotiations with the music departments of the universities, colleges, and the most important music schools in the New York area concerning the reciprocity of credits”; according to his own reports, all agreed to accept credit for courses taken in the School of Sacred Music once it received its state charter.²⁶ Werner also assisted in creating a symbolic “Advisory Council” for the school in an attempt to show support from a wide variety of Jewish individuals and organizations.²⁷ With evident pride in their endeavors, the School’s founders thus looked to give the School a distinguished place at the crossroads of New York’s Jewish and academic life.

The Reform movement leadership also tried to see to it that the School would serve the movement’s own needs. To add greater weight to the founding of the School and its intended mission, Dean Franzblau conducted an exploratory survey of North American Reform congregations and their receptivity to cantor-educators in 1948. Working from 275 responses,²⁸ Franzblau painted a rosy picture. Less than a quarter of the reporting congregations currently employed cantors; and of those cantors, over 60% had responsibilities outside of religious ritual, “most of them educational.”²⁹ Seventeen percent of the other congregations, meanwhile—most located outside the Eastern United States—expressed interest in hiring a cantor-educator in the near future.³⁰ These figures affirmed the Reform movement’s own readiness to establish a cantorial school. By deciding positively to focus on training “cantor-educators” rather than “cantors only,” and by ensuring that a space in the movement existed for the school’s graduates, it could tailor the needs of the new institution specifically to serve the perceived trends in the movement.

Applicants, drawn by numerous personal inquiries and advertisements in German, Yiddish, and English Jewish-interest periodicals, came with little difficulty;³¹ over forty potential students had applied to the new program by the end of Spring, 1948.³² Werner and Franzblau imposed significant requirements for admission: a high school diploma, facility in English, fluent reading of Hebrew prayers, the ability “to translate simple passages from the Prayer Book,” and basic competence in vocal performance, piano, sight reading, and music theory.³³ In actual auditions, however, evaluators offered some flexibility for those who fell slightly short of these expectations. Students also needed to submit to a psychological evaluation (HUSESM 1949–1950: 123) and possibly a “physiological” throat examination to assess vocal potential.³⁴ Ultimately, these auditions yielded an initial class of sixteen students, with backgrounds ranging from yeshiva to opera. Openly proclaiming its commitment to a “k’lal yisrael” approach, the School in its press release publicized its students’ ambitions to enter cantorial positions across the Jewish denominational spectrum.³⁵

On Saturday evening, October 16, 1948, the Hebrew Union School of Sacred Music conducted its opening exercises in the auditorium of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion building at forty West Sixty-Eighth Street. Representatives from the Jewish Theological Seminary, the Jewish Music Forum, the Society for the Advancement of Jewish Liturgical Music, and the Jewish Music Council; the Cantors Assembly of the United Synagogue, the Association of Reform Cantors and Ministers, and the Chazonim Farband (Cantors Ministers Association); Columbia University, New York University, and City College of New York; the Juilliard School, the Organists’ Guild, Westminster Choir College, and the major press organizations all received invitations to attend.³⁶ Together with the faculty of the new school, they would welcome the inaugural class of male cantorial students, as well as three female “special students” pursuing advanced degrees in Jewish music.³⁷ With great fanfare, the founders of the School heralded its opening as a new start for Jewish music in the United States.

Consolidating the Cantor

The School’s first students commenced a projected three-year program, taking music classes three days per week, and evening classes in Hebrew language and Jewish education twice a week. As they progressed in their studies, however, the curriculum made three significant shifts. First was the addition of more Western musicianship and music theory classes. In the school’s initial course listing, the School’s organizers stated their intention to provide instruction “exclusively in the Jewish field,” implying that students came in with an acceptable level of Western musicianship training (HUSESM 1948–1949: 103).³⁸ It appears, though, that most students admitted to the School lacked that background (W. Sharlin [Ruben], 1997);³⁹ thus, the School implemented a “Sight Singing” class starting in 1949 (HUSESM 1949–1950: 134), and courses on basic music theory and choral “Score Reading” the following year (HUSESM 1950–1951: 149). By the 1955–56 academic year, the School had in place an entire musicianship sequence, ostensibly bringing such skills into the cantorial transmission process (HUSESM 1955–1956: 160–161, 167).

A second curricular shift involved the introduction of vocal tutorials called “coaching.” Initially the School’s organizers created these short sessions to give students supplementary or remedial assistance, especially (presumably) to those who officiated at weekend pulpits during their course of study.⁴⁰ They began in late 1948, when Abraham Franzblau asked one of the most experienced students to coach three other particularly deficient students. This single coach, however, quickly turned into a “coaching staff” that included a prominent retired cantor and two experienced synagogue musicians.⁴¹ By the School’s second year, “Coaching” appeared in the published “Summary of Curriculum” with the designation “as needed.” In 1950–1951, coaching received its first listing in the course catalog, with a description that continued to emphasize a pandenominational approach: “The individual coaches specialize in the Orthodox, Conservative or Reform traditions, and all students work under all three. They are thus qualified to serve as cantors in all three traditions” (HUSESM 1950–1951). The following year, the School coordinated its coaching schedule with a new series of practical “Workshop” classes that focused on the “[d]emonstration, practice and intensive drill” of a different denomination’s “Hazanut” each year; students would thus have an opportunity to reinforce the musical material learned in class on an individual basis with a specialist in the same repertoire (HUSESM 1951–1952: 159).⁴² Recognized as an important practical supplement to classroom learning, and a potent vehicle for helping students master a range of Jewish cantorial traditions, coaching came to help the School’s leadership pursue its vision of the “modern” cantor: a figure educated in the “whole” Jewish musical tradition with the potential to navigate facilely through the Jewish musical world.

Interestingly, this approach seems to have contributed to the third shift: a transformation of the categories used to teach synagogue music into “Traditional” and “Reform” repertoires. By 1952–1953, the School had reorganized its Workshop courses to focus on traditional chants, conforming roughly to the Jewish liturgical calendar: Sabbath and Festivals⁴³ in the first year, Festivals and High Holidays in the second year, and more advanced and varied musical pieces in the third year (HUSESM 1952–1953: 155–156). To supplement this sequence, however, the School also instituted a two-year-long “Reform Workshop” course aimed specifically at instructing students in musical literature and musical issues particular to the Reform movement (Ibid.: 153).⁴⁴ These changes indicated a move away from a denominational system of cantorial instruction, and toward a more Reform movement-oriented program: perhaps in part because the Conservative movement had just opened its own cantorial school in 1952. The School’s ability to produce a cantor that could serve k’lal yisrael, in this configuration, came mainly to reference a state of knowledge (or even enlightenment) rather than a full range of practice. By instilling a “Reform”/“Traditional” dichotomy into the cantorial curriculum, the School’s organizers thus appeared to refocus their sights on the Reform movement, while retaining their devotion to the broader cantorial tradition.⁴⁵

All these moves supplemented a crucial mission of the School: developing and canonizing a common, written, “authentic” series of cantorial and synagogue works that could represent the cantor’s core repertoire. To Eric Werner, this process would help reinforce the borders of cantorial tradition and guard Jewish music against what he called “pseudo-” or “spurious” tradition (perhaps after Sapir 1924).⁴⁶ “We accept it as our sacred task not only to seek out and identify germane [Jewish musical] tradition,” Werner wrote with Franzblau, “but also to implement it practically in the training of our students [i.e., to make sure students can present musical material in a way that is true to tradition, yet relevant to a congregation]. Accordingly, our faculty set out to select and integrate all available cantorial material which meets the canons of authenticity and tradition, liturgical soundness, musical excellence and taste” (Werner and Franzblau 1952). To facilitate this transformation, the School of Sacred Music began to select and publish its own materials under what soon became known as the Sacred Music Press. The first of these works, a three-volume “Cantorial Thesaurus” by celebrated cantor Adolph Katchko,⁴⁷ became a basic learning tool for cantorial students, and embodied the School’s intention to reestablish a cantorial tradition in America. Although the School’s directors made tentative plans to publish “portions of [the Thesaurus] from time to time” for other cantors and the general public, they ultimately saw the Katchko collection as the School’s unique inheritance. The material for all three volumes appeared in Photostat for classroom use at the School from the time of its completion; but several years would pass before the second and third volumes saw official publication (I. Goldstein. May 9, 2001).⁴⁸ Katchko’s Thesaurus thus became a source of well-guarded identity—not to mention a wellspring of cantorial “tradition”—for the School’s graduates and instructors.

Soon afterward, the Sacred Music Press began its “Out of Print Classics” project, reissuing thirty-five major collections of previously scarce European synagogue music (many of which had been prepared originally as teaching tools).⁴⁹ By republishing these materials, the Sacred Music Press promoted them as legitimate carriers of synagogue musical tradition, which in turn legitimized the Press (and the written score in general) as a vessel for the production and continuation of synagogue music. Although these books factored less centrally in the School’s curriculum, the Out of Print Classics series nonetheless became a symbol of the intellectual “revival” of Jewish music; and it provided the School with a depth of printed literature that aligned it with the European cantorial tradition. Eric Werner, moreover, framed the volumes as important sources for scholarly inquiry “[s]ince the study of Jewish folk-lore, the acme of which is the chant of the Synagogue, is now a serious discipline” (Werner 1953: III). By acquiring and studying these books, Werner suggested, the “new” cantor graduated by the School of Sacred Music could gain scholarly credentials: historically recreating the “traditions” of his people while meeting the “scientific” standards of Western academia.

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In 1953, the School underwent an important transition period that further marked both its continuity with “tradition” and its professional discontinuity with the pre-War past. With significant fanfare, and after approximately two years of negotiations, the School combined with the Chazonim Farband (Ministers Cantors Association) to establish a “Board of Certification for Cantors” (SSM Meets Farband 1952; HUSESM 1955–1956: 178). Cantors who successfully met the standards established by the Board (as well as students who successfully completed cantorial education at the School of Sacred Music) would gain “certification” as well as the right to become members in the new “American Conference of Certified Cantors.”⁵⁰ “With … a school to train new, qualified cantors, and a procedure for accreditation of the established qualified cantors serving congregations,” noted the 1953 School of Sacred Music course catalog, “the standards and the status of the Cantorate in the country may be safeguarded and advanced” (Ibid.: 136).

The School’s curriculum saw further refinement and expansion in subsequent years, often with an eye toward further academic legitimacy. In 1953–54, the School of Sacred Music revamped its program into a four-year course of study that granted both a Cantor’s diploma and a Bachelor of Sacred Music degree.⁵¹ A Master of Sacred Music degree program, for students who wished to continue their studies, began in 1954 (HUSESM 1954–1955: 158–162). Also in 1954, one of the School’s first graduates helped found a “Department of Sacred Music” at the newly created Los Angeles College of Jewish Studies (a branch of the Hebrew Union College) that eventually provided what it described as the equivalent of two years of cantorial training. By 1955, meanwhile, the increased liberal arts workload of the bachelor’s degree, combined with unrealistic congregational expectations for “cantor-educators,”⁵² led the School to drop its education component and focus solely on training cantors.

The School also aimed to improve its graduates’ status as clergy. When the program for the Bachelor of Sacred Music expanded to five years in 1958, it added requirements promoting interaction between cantorial students and students in its older rabbinical program, with the hope of achieving some kind of parity between the two roles (Role of the Cantor 1963; HUSESM Catalog, 1958–1959).⁵³ These changes reflected the School’s attempt to shift relations in the Reform pulpit to accommodate the “new” cantorate. Debates on the “role” and power of these figures would remain a sensitive topic for decades.

In the 1970s, the School of Sacred Music opened its training to women. The three female “special students” who had been accepted into the first class of the School of Sacred Music in 1948 had been unable to receive the title of cantor. By 1970, however, when the School accepted its first woman as a proper cantorial student, the admissions committee’s decision bore little if any controversy on religious or conventional grounds; many of the issues had already been addressed by that time, two years after the Hebrew Union College had admitted Sally Priesand to its rabbinical program (Nadell 1998: 148–157). For Barbara Ostfeld, the School’s first female student, moreover, the decision to become a cantor had no activist overtones (Cook 1971). Rather, as Ostfeld later recalled, her experience at the School was almost entirely unremarkable: from initial audition to classes to graduation, Ostfeld remembered having supportive teachers and classmates, and few problems obtaining student or permanent pulpits (Ruben 2007).⁵⁴ From the perspective of k’lal yisrael, however, the School’s decision to admit Ostfeld strongly suggested its orientation toward the Reform movement by that time; the Conservative Cantors Institute (of the Jewish Theological Seminary) would not accept female cantorial students officially until the mid-1980s,⁵⁵ and Orthodox groups have continued to educate only male cantors well into the first years of the twenty-first century. Ostfeld’s cantorial investiture in Spring 1975 thus marked the first time a woman had received the title from a movement-sanctioned body, and began an era of rapid demographic change at the School. Within a few years, as the School’s program simultaneously shifted from undergraduate to graduate training, female cantorial students came to outnumber men.⁵⁶

The dynamic between rabbi and cantor remained a concern throughout this time. Even with some interaction between rabbinical and cantorial students on the New York campus, the School of Sacred Music remained a relatively separate entity. All rabbinical students spent their first year of study in Jerusalem bonding, while cantorial students learned in New York; and rabbinical students who proceeded from Jerusalem to Hebrew Union College’s main campus in Cincinnati rarely even met the cantorial students, and thus knew little about their training. In order to temper this division, School of Sacred Music director Dr. Lawrence Hoffman moved first-year cantorial studies to the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew Union College in 1986, so students could study side by side with the first-year rabbinical students.⁵⁷ Done with the hope of encouraging rabbinical and cantorial students to work together as co-clergy, the decision served to open lines of communication between the programs, and facilitate dialogue between what had been developing as two contrasting Reform Jewish cultures.

By 2007, the School of Sacred Music had invested 434 cantors, including 179 women.⁵⁸ Maintaining a total enrollment of between thirty and fifty-five students since 1975, it annually graduated classes ranging in size between six and sixteen. Reform congregations regularly hired most of the School’s graduates; and the group’s professional organization, the American Conference of Cantors (shortened in name soon after its inception) existed at the time of my research as an official organ of Reform Judaism, the vast majority of its membership consisting of SSM alumni.⁵⁹ Alumni also comprised a commanding majority of the School’s cantorial faculty, illustrating the extent to which the institution had become a modern repository of cantorial scholarship and an arbiter of cantorial tradition.

While the School still saw its mission as instructing students to lead services in synagogues of all Jewish denominations, it engaged most fervently in debates specific to Reform Judaism, and required students to take classes in Reform Jewish philosophy and liturgy as part of their studies. Its embrace of instrumentally accompanied repertoire, as well its acceptance of female students, have made it at least partially incompatible with the practices of other movements. Yet in many ways these same situations fulfilled Eric Werner’s ambitions for the School. Fashioning its own image of American Jewish music through a reinvented cantorial figure, the School of Sacred Music became a self-fashioned purveyor of Jewish “modernity” and musical scholarship: using “modern” academic techniques, religious philosophies, and institutionalized settings as media for bringing Jewish music to a more “authentic” state and a more central role within the American Jewish world.

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With this background in place, I begin my ethnographic study of cantorial training at the School of Sacred Music between 1999–2002.