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 until the mid-1980s,55 and Orthodox groups have continued 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
