Читать книгу The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor - Judah M. Cohen - Страница 8

Note on Transliteration and Transcription

The Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music exists within the world of American Reform Judaism. Thus, with the exception of citations from other works, I will transliterate Hebrew terms according to the Union for Reform Judaism’s own style sheet, the “URJ Transliteration Guidelines and Master Word List” (Corman and Person, 2005). This approach reflects the practices of the URJ Press (the publications arm of the Union for Reform Judaism), and consequently serves as the normative means by which the School of Sacred Music community represents Hebrew in English characters.

The written musical examples in this book appear in the same spirit. As an ethnomusicologist, I recognize the challenges inherent in giving sound a written form. Scholars who study music in other communities often shy away from using “standard” Western notation, since such an approach too often disregards the significance of local musical thinking processes. The cantor’s world has similar considerations: cantorial practice has long been seen as a phenomenon that entered the Western sphere with the modern era, and eventually translated itself onto the Western musical staff. Students and instructors at the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music have come to this legacy by relying heavily on oral transmission, while simultaneously valuing Western notation as a common currency for learning, distributing, and analyzing musical phenomena. I have attempted to follow a similar path in this book. Nearly all the musical examples I discuss appear on the accompanying compact disc. In addition, however, I have transcribed several selections in Western notation for closer analysis and consideration in a way that reflects the community’s musical thought processes. In a few cases I also use notation to reproduce abstract musical concepts developed within the Jewish musical world itself. By taking this approach, I hope to provide both a representation of the sounds produced within the American cantorate, and a sensitized consideration of what it means for cantors and cantorial students to make those sounds.