The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen
“[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