The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor. Judah M. Cohen
4 begins the heart of the study by introducing and describing the phenomenon of the “synagogue practicum.” An activity required of all second- and third-year students that generally entailed presenting assigned sections of religious rituals, the Practicum officially exists outside the regular classroom curriculum. Nonetheless, it holds great significance to both students and faculty, and serves as a platform for airing many of the major aesthetic, theoretical and practical issues faced by the cantorial students throughout their program. Using the Practicum as a lens, then, I will continue into chapters 5 and 6 by delineating several of these issues: how cantors define and classify their repertoire; how they clarify the production of cantorial “sound”; how the School of Sacred Music serves as a site for preserving and propagating cantorial memory; and how gender, and especially women’s voices, factors into perceptions about cantorial repertoire and technique. Through the discussions in these chapters, I hope to offer insight into the ways aesthetics and aural practices come to be understood as “cantorial” through the values propagated at the School, as well as explore how the School has dealt with change over the past decades to “update” the cantorate while maintaining its continuity with tradition.
I conclude by returning to my starting point: the cantorial investment ceremony. At each cantorial student’s moment of transformation, he or she becomes the full embodiment of cantorial history, sound, and knowledge, emerging as a public representative of a cantorial culture. “Investment,” I thus intend to show, signifies a multi-layered shift in identity. Through an analysis of these layers, I illustrate the depth to which investment/investiture recontextualizes a cantorial student-turned-cantor within the cultural world of Reform Judaism, and subsequently paves the way for a continued, and continually negotiated, embodiment of the cantorial figure. This last discussion revisits broad questions about the dynamic between identity formation, authority, and musical practice, in order to address discourses on the meaning of religious music, musical change, the relationship between music, modernity, institutionalization, and the meaning of becoming a musical leader from both inside and out.
The process of achieving musical competence, I suggest here, plays a crucial role in examining how a society negotiates its own musical values. Not merely the reception of a monolithic, unchanging tradition, the process comprises a nexus of social, musical, and personal pressures, all of which both reinforce and threaten to destabilize a constructed status quo—a sense of tradition. Leaders-in-training, to become a part of that tradition, must negotiate between their own needs, the authority of their teachers, and the boundaries of the social and organizational entities they strive to join. These musical religious figures, and their deeply complex pathways and decisions en route to musical authority, provide the voices by which their cantorate, and this book, have come to exist.
A Note on Nusach
Over the course of this study, the term nusach will appear in a number of different contexts. A variable concept, nusach roughly describes a relationship between music or melody and liturgical text.
Etymologies of the word change drastically based on setting and intended usage. In 1933, for example, German Cantor Reuben Moses Eschwege derived nusach from Biblical usages that, he argued, described “something removed [i.e., written down] from what has existed [presumably in oral tradition].” Eschwege reinforced his etymology by linking the word to an analogous Aramaic term (nus’cha) that, he claimed, meant “copy” (Eschwege 1996–97 [1933]: 42). At the School of Sacred Music, meanwhile, I heard two other etymologies: the first, derived from the modern Hebrew word for “formula” or “pattern,” corresponded to an idea of nusach as a series of idiomatic melodic fragments sewn into a single musical “fabric”; and the second etymology framed nusach as emerging from the Hebrew word for “fixed,” emphasizing the consistent and idiomatic nature of the aforementioned fragments.
Jewish music scholars have found the term similarly slippery. Hanoch Avenary’s attempts at distilling a definition for the Encyclopedia Judaica (1971) offered merely a starting point for understanding the phenomenon: distinguishing between “general” usage, and more “technical” usage denoting the “specific musical mode to which a certain part of the liturgy is sung.” While well-mapped, however, Avenary lacked bibliographic support, and relied in part on anecdotal evidence (especially for “general” usage).
Eric Werner avoided using the term nusach altogether, preferring instead to approach the relationship between sound and text in Central and Eastern European Jewish prayer though the concept of Minhag Ashkenaz (the “Central [and later Eastern] European practice”) (Werner 1976: 1). Even in the absence of the term, however, cantors have interpreted Werner’s concept as an equivalent to nusach, and used his ideas accordingly. Werner closely related Minhag Ashkenaz to liturgical developments over the history of Ashkenazic Jewry (which he dates back to the Middle Ages), and structured his book to deal with what he considered a taxonomy of the style’s distinct components. In ascending order of “complexity,” he recognized: “Plain Psalmody,” “Ornate Psalmody,” “Plain Response,” “Refrain,” “Antiphony,” “Free melismatic recitative,” “Missinai Tunes and Chants,” “Pure melismatic chant,” “Cantillation of scriptural texts” and “Cantorial fantasia.” Taking an approach that combined anecdote and assumption with historical research, Werner explored this system primarily with an eye toward fleshing out a grand narrative of the “tradition.” His discussions, however, based on an overall conception of stylistic “authenticity,” often led Werner to criticize current practice for its lack of historical awareness. This agenda led the book to become an insider discourse in itself, more a prescriptive device for understanding nusach than a descriptive one.
More recent ethnomusicology studies have made inroads into exploring the “insider” understandings of nusach. Mark Slobin also found nusach to be a vague term that served well as a point of cantorial discussion, yet eluded musicological analysis (Slobin 1989: 256–279). After producing several quotes on the subject of nusach, Slobin wrote:
… the foregoing quotations suggest nusach is involved in everything from hiring through youth relations, viewed as anything from a discipline gracefully accepted to a hindrance proudly rejected. Nusach is simultaneously musical and political. It is learned, but it might be “absorbed.” Nusach should automatically tell you what season it is, yet performing “traditional nusach” can mean “cleaning up” and “reducing” a famous teacher’s approach, as long as the “soul” is kept. Meanwhile, the real master of nusach may not even be the hazzan—the artist—but the “ordinary” ba’al tefillah, perhaps just a volunteer prayer leader. Finally, as background it is very much worth noting that nusach originated as a textual, not a musical term, and that it might imply much more than either text or tune: “way of life.”
The only point of agreement is that nusach is the emblem of tradition and that it somehow specifies, stipulates, or situates a musical moment, perhaps in a particular locale (Slobin 1989: 260).
Slobin attempted to investigate nusach quasi-historically by analyzing collected variants on two chant selections. While suggesting that the process of chanting nusach reflected a historical “core concept” in Eastern-European cantorial “tradition,” he also noted the lack of historical material for comparison, and ended up framing his analysis as representing “truly a cross section of today’s [cantorial] professionals” (272; emphasis added).
Jeffrey Summit followed Slobin by exploring nusach as an indicator of religious identity in five contrasting contemporary Jewish communities throughout the Boston area (Summit 2000: 105–127, see also Summit 2006). Through interviews with both congregants and religious leaders, he portrayed nusach as a decentered “folk” term of sorts, used by individuals as an entry point into numerous dimensions of Jewish identity. Summit suggested: “contemporary conceptions of nusach are bound up in these Jews’ struggles with modernity and efforts to clarify and assert their religious and cultural identity” (127). His approach, like Slobin’s, effectively mapped out the term’s varied landscape among a wide range of