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