The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen
in my head as we played in the park or watched Sesame Street together.
My parents, Richard and Treasure Cohen cultivated in me the inquisitive, enthusiastic and deep-thinking spirit that led me to this pursuit, and continued to challenge me all the way through the process. Their support and love over the years instilled in me the confidence to strike out on my own path, even in the face of difficult times and long odds. Thank you also to Stanley and Edna Nash, who not only had enough faith in me to let me marry their daughter, but also have been supportive and caring in-laws, rejoicing in my successes and counseling me in times of hardship.
For helping to fund my research and travel, I am grateful to have received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a John Knowles Paine Travelling Fellowship, and an Edward H. Kavinoky Summer Fellowship. Early in the writing stage, fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture offered important support, allowing me to pursue my endeavors full time; and summer faculty fellowships from Indiana University allowed me to concentrate on completing my manuscript. At the publication stage, I received generous assistance from the Helen B. Schwartz Fund for New Scholarship in Jewish Studies and the Faculty Fund of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program.
I am also grateful to my music and Jewish studies colleagues at New York University and Indiana University, including my compatriots in NYU’s Working Group on Jews and Media (especially its conveners, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler). They all have given me the gift of a rich intellectual environment in which I could continue my work over the past six years. Both directly and indirectly, their conversations have helped shape my ideas for this and many future projects.
Janet Rabinowitch, my editor at the Indiana University Press, has been a steady force in moving this project along. Thank you also to Katherine Baber and Brian Herrmann, whose able hands and organizational prowess helped this manuscript (and this author) negotiate the complex publication process. Ruth Stone and Alan Burdette, moreover, have been instrumental in encouraging me to extend this project beyond the written word; as part of a connected initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation, I have been able to deposit and notate video relating to this book in the Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA). I am grateful to Indiana University Press for its support of this new direction, which has rich implications for the future; users can access my material via a link on the IU Press website.
Most importantly, I wish to thank the School of Sacred Music graduating classes of 2000–2003, whose members graciously included me in so many of their activities, somehow managed to fit long interviews into their insanely busy schedules, and generously allowed me to record and observe their every move throughout the educational process: David, Margaret, Jonathan, Brad, Ilana, Amy, David, Daniel, Sergei, Diane, Michel, Susan, Rosalie, Lisa, Rebecca, Hollis, Wendy, Kari, Jeff, Seth, Alison, Jason, Jill, Larisa, Adina, Kim, Regina, Erin, Miriam, Sally, Galina, Tanya, Gabi, Mark, David, Jeff, Tracey, Kerith, Rosalie, Irena, and Leon. Their voices serve as the heart of this work, and their active engagement with this project as students, and later as established professionals, has been the greatest gift a researcher could have. Throughout, they trusted me with their personal opinions, aspirations, and concerns about the cantorial training process, and allowed me to be a part of their lives. I can only hope that I have given their words, and their experiences of cantorial training, justice.
Writing about the lives of developing musical figures holds significant challenge, particularly when, years later, those same people become prominent public authorities and representatives of their art. Few people are comfortable having others chronicle their formative experiences. I therefore offer my gratitude to a community that has endowed me with the generosity and trust to do just that. At the same time, in order to honor that trust, I have given my research associates the option to be quoted anonymously. This approach, I feel, still allows the reader an intimate view into the communal musical training experience, while acknowledging that opening such a window entails a great deal of sensitivity. In addition, I hasten to remind the reader that the personal quotations I include in this book represent a community’s thoughts during a formative time period, in a specific (often insular) environment, and at an early stage of professional development. They appear in the “rough”: as transcribed speech, with minimal embellishment, in order to remain as true as possible to the moment and circumstances in which they were expressed. I take full responsibility for any inaccurate or misleading contexts in which they appear.
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.
The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor
Introduction: A Moment of Transformation
[W]hen my turn came, standing in front of [the President of Hebrew Union College] … and lookin’ in [his] eyes, and when he said [“Are you up to the task of this?”] to me, and I just kept nodding like: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.” I felt certain about it.…
There was something transcendent about the whole experience … I think it will really stay with me. I mean I was thinking: “Not everybody can be clergy. You are privileged. This is a real honor.” And I remember thinking: “Yeah, graduate and undergraduate … graduation was special. But this, this is something different.… This is a transformation.”
—D. Yomtov, May 22, 2000
Sunday morning, May 21, 2000. The huge expanse of the sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El of the City of New York provided a grand resonating space for the pipe organ that signaled the start of the academic procession. From a curtained loft hidden high above the pulpit, a choir of students and faculty from the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music began to sing. And then, on cue, the graduating class of rabbinic and cantorial students from the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion processed in from the back of the sanctuary. “Baruch HaBa B’Shem Adonai,” the choir intoned in a setting by British composer Stephen Glass: “Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God!” Families and friends of the graduates stood in the pews on either side of the processional aisle, watching as the black-robed graduates strode toward the pulpit. Instructors and honored guests followed, several in full academic regalia. As they marched, the organist progressed through a succession of majestic compositions by both Jewish and non-Jewish composers.1 Those officiating at the ceremony took their spots on the