The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen
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.
2
Seeking the Tradition
In 1996, the American Conference of Cantors and Guild of Temple Musicians had its conference in Toronto. And I volunteered at it.… I walked around with a name tag that said “Cantor Wannabe” on it, as a conversation starter.… It was an incredible experience, because I didn’t grow up with cantors. And I didn’t know, what these cantor people were like. And I went to this convention … to try and find out what cantors were like; to talk to them; to find out what the whole thing was about. And that experience was what made me realize that that’s what I wanted to do.
—L. Doob, Feb. 14, 2000
Who can become a cantor?
By the end of the twentieth century, pursuing the cantorate within American liberal Jewish circles constituted both a calling and a career choice. While the training process no longer required years of apprenticeship, it remained a rarified pathway involving constant cantorial supervision. Aspirants to the cantorate had to recognize (and have others recognize) their potential as religious musical leaders; they had to approach a teacher or teachers who could affirm that potential; and they had to arrange their lives and finances to accommodate their intended training. These preparations, however, served only as a prelude. Once they had put a cantorial support structure in place, they could start their formal application to cantorial school.
Gaining access to cantorial training meant negotiating an application process similar in style and content to that of a graduate school or music conservatory. Aspirants inquired with the program’s director and then applied by sending written materials to a central admissions office. Faculty, in turn, evaluated applicants for their musical and spiritual potential, and then decided as a group to admit, defer, or deny admission. Through this multi-step procedure, established cantorial authorities could assess each student’s readiness to acquire the skills and discourses necessary for embarking upon cantorial training.
Application also served as an initial form of cultural engagement, requiring aspirants to model several of the skills deemed necessary for success in cantorial school. By showing themselves sufficiently compatible with the School’s social, religious, musical, and ideological norms, potential students aimed to convince faculty of their ability to represent both the cantorate and Reform Judaism. Their willingness, meanwhile, to undergo multiple means of assessment—written and spoken, performative and spiritual, intellectual and personal—allowed the School of Sacred Music faculty to preserve the cantorate’s exclusivity, while addressing the expectations attached to becoming a Reform Jewish musical authority. Applicants conversely used the process to determine their own investment in pursuing the School’s form of cantorial identity.
Coming to the Cantorate
Although the School of Sacred Music had long been an organ of Reform Judaism by the time I began my research in 1999, students came to the institution from a variety of Jewish backgrounds. Their respective decisions to apply to cantorial school resulted from a range of personal choices. Even so, however, their narratives seemed to hold important commonalities that illuminated the significance of certain trajectories toward cantorial training.1
Overwhelmingly, students viewed the decision to apply to cantorial school as a career choice. Reinforced by the School of Sacred Music’s status as a graduate/professional program (requiring all students to complete the equivalent of a bachelors degree before matriculation), all but one of the students I interviewed only began to consider the cantorate seriously during or after their years as college undergraduates. Most entered college intending to pursue other paths, and majored in such subjects as biochemistry, psychology, anthropology, and different forms of art music performance. Several also spent time in other professional fields before turning to the cantorate. Each student’s eventual choice to apply to cantorial school thus served as an alternative to other professional careers, and in most cases seemed a fitting path for continuing a liberal arts education.
The decision to attend cantorial school consequently differed substantively from the Golden Age models delineated by Mark Slobin (1989: 13–21) and some of the School’s older alumni.2 Where cantors were once seen to begin their journeys as young children recruited by mentors and trained over many years, applicants to the School of Sacred Music frequently started their cantorial training around the time of their application. Sometimes applicants’ childhood activities, including participation in youth choirs, paralleled the experiences of young choir boys (meshorerim) from the earlier era. Yet these involvements seemed incidental even in retrospect, receiving significance only during collegiate or post-collegiate life reassessments if at all.
From my cantorial student interviews, three contrasting pathways to the cantorate emerged, highlighting different but converging approaches to the meaning of cantorial identity within Reform Judaism.
The first pathway, usually experienced by one or two students in