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 each class-year, began with a strong identification with Reform Judaism and its constituent organizations. Students who had taken this path often grew up in families where parents held lay or liturgical leadership roles in Reform congregations; they invariably participated in the movement’s youth group (NFTY, or the North American Federation of Temple Youth); and they spent several years both experiencing and leading music in Reform-influenced Jewish summer camps.3 Noted one:
I grew up in a Jewish household; was Bat Mitzvahed and confirmed; went to religious school for confirmation … And then growing up, I was heavily involved in music and theater activities, both Jewish and secular.… And heavily involved in NFTY. I was a regional board member for a few years. I spent time in a number of different summer camps … as a staff member and music specialist. (Interview)
While undergraduates and post-graduates, these applicants continued to serve in (often youth-oriented) leadership capacities within Reform Judaism, relying on the movement for both spiritual and financial well-being (as paid song leaders, for example). They thus came to the School of Sacred Music seeing themselves as future Reform Jewish clergy, familiar with the movement’s tenets and discourses, and invested in its future.
In part because the cantorate had little to no presence in the Reform youth movement in the last half of the twentieth century, students with strong Reform Jewish backgrounds saw cantors initially as marginal figures in their lives, generally unrelated to their active religious interests. They applied for cantorial school less from an interest in the culture of the cantorate than from a desire to pool their strengths into a professional position within the movement. Said one student:
I was around twenty-five [years old] and I decided: “You know, I look back over all my experience, every summer and I see where I am, and what I love doing. I realize that it’s Jewish music and synagogue life, and Jewish life. And I’ve had all these wonderful experiences that have given me insight into working with people and administrative parts of Temple life.…” And I realized that I needed to be doing something where I can be creative, artistically and musically. Where I wasn’t just doing the same thing all the time, where I wasn’t at a desk all the time, where I was working with people of different ages. And the cantorate really combined all those things and I had an affinity to synagogue life.… [The] pieces just came together. It did. Just became the obvious. And it chose me. Really. (Interview)
Significantly, these students seemed to place a great deal of importance on their identities as Reform Jews when applying to cantorial school. As opposed to many of the other School of Sacred Music students, none of those with a strong Reform Jewish background seriously appeared to consider cantorial schools sponsored by other Jewish movements (such as the Jewish Theological Seminary’s H. L. Miller Cantorial School). Their movement affiliation proved even more significant considering the students’ misgivings about the musical materials and values they saw taught at the School, which seemed different from the musical values they knew growing up:
[I]t’s not like I ever thought of becoming a cantor—people would say “Oh, you should become a cantor.” But I didn’t want to.… The model was not something that I wanted to emulate. The models that I had—people that were cantors where I was growing up, were just … they didn’t inspire me.… (Interview)
Intimate knowledge of the movement’s practices, however, empowered students to apply nonetheless, often in the hope of addressing the movement’s needs more effectively. Immediately after the above statement, the same student added:
[A]nd I began to learn that I didn’t have to be like that.… that I could be more involved than some cantors had been in the past in the community itself. But then [there were also] other aspects of being a clergyperson.… [T]he style of service was changing, and it didn’t have to be a cantor that always did a service [in] an operatic style or always performance style.… There could be more participation and different kinds of melodies. (Interview)
Students
