found, held different ideas about the sounds of Judaism than what they had learned? How did their training prepare them for careers as pastoral leaders within liberal Jewish life? And perhaps most significantly, What had they become after their time at the School of Sacred Music?
In this book, I intend to explore that musical becoming—the process by which students learned, internalized, and then assumed the knowledge and abilities necessary to become communal, recognized, musical authorities.
Ethnomusicologists have long looked to musical authorities as crucial sources for understanding musical cultures: they have studied with them, marking musical growth under their tutelage as key parts of the participant observation process; and they have often used the knowledge and opinions obtained from these authorities as lenses for evaluating broader questions of musical style, structure, and social activity. Yet despite their centrality to the concerns of ethnomusicology, musical authorities have received relatively little critical scrutiny as figures who themselves had to undergo their own forms of musical transformation. Fieldworkers treated them as idols of sorts: the faces of musical practice, active symbols of musical tradition (often in opposition to modernity, external political and financial influence, or commercialism), and gatekeepers of musical knowledge. Ethnomusicology’s major figures included them prominently in their conceptions of the field: Alan Merriam devoted an entire chapter of his seminal 1964 book The Anthropology of Music to establishing these authorities as “specialists” (1964: 123–144), and Mantle Hood, in his textbook The Ethnomusicologist, emphasized finding and working intensively with teachers as a first priority for fieldworkers (1982[1971]: 212, 230–246). Important as such interactions became to fostering cultural and musical understanding, however, they also created spaces of ethical ambivalence, particularly if the musical authority’s status came to be seen a cultural variable in itself. After all, according to what standards did a musical authority come into being in the first place? Questions of how such authorities gained their stature all too frequently fell outside a research project’s analytical frame, receiving at best anecdotal treatment, and taking a necessary back seat to inquiries about less sensitive (and potentially less self-undermining) areas of musical tradition and style.
In this book I aim to take a deeper look into the creation of musical authority by scrutinizing the process by which one such figure, the Reform Jewish cantor, gains identity and prestige. Musical leaders do not simply come into the world—they must undergo extensive periods of training and transformation to develop specialized skills, gain a social network, and fall in line with a sense of historical expectation, all while displaying the ability, the spiritual resolve, the personal tenacity, and the “talent” (or a similar intangible factor) to achieve some form of success. The process often requires those who seek authority to dwell in a state of vulnerability, where they can change their habits, their beliefs, their techniques and their philosophies on the whim of a comment in order to satisfy an instructor. Yet they must also make their own choices throughout, and take on challenges of increasing complexity. From the first identification of potential, to the opening stages of initiation, to entrance into an accepted educational framework, to rigorous and complex negotiations of identity, to successive tiers of achievement and skill, and finally to the completion of the training process, students enter into relationships with one or many instructors under the presumption that after sufficient time and practice, they will cross the threshold from disciples to colleagues. The path toward musical authority therefore involves not just a reciprocal commitment from other authorities, but also the students’ investment in an uncertain but hoped-for future.
The training process toward musical leadership thus outlines a broad spectrum of variables. Becoming a musical leader requires an individual to adopt some notion of a longstanding tradition; but it also requires student and teacher to mediate, refine, redefine, and challenge that tradition throughout a prolonged process of transformation. The centralized and esoteric nature of the training process keeps much of the tradition insulated from broader cultural activity and public opinion; musical leadership, however, also relies on a public trust built by meaningfully presenting that tradition to the broader community. Any changes to repertoire, technique, and style happen under the watch of accepted practitioners, and hold greater meaning than the practices of musical outsiders; yet musical outsiders have often compelled musical authorities to reconsider their aesthetic values to maintain relevance in their communities. As understandings of the tradition inevitably shift over time, the learning process and its associated collective of practitioners become key factors in keeping it specialized, distinct, and intact; and yet the learning process also brings new people, new ideas, and new forms of flexibility into the tradition.
Several scholars have addressed the complex subject of musical training and the attainment of musical authority. Benjamin Brinner, for instance, described the idea of attaining what he called “musical competence” as:
… individualized mastery of the array of interrelated skills and knowledge that is required of musicians within a particular tradition or musical community and is acquired and developed in response to and in accordance with the demands and possibilities of general and specific cultural, social and musical conditions. (Brinner 1995: 28; italics inverse of original)
Brinner, in exploring the components of musical authority, detailed a model for “knowing” music, denoting domains such as “sound quality” and “symbolic representation” as skills that required specific attention (40–41); he suggested ways by which musicians within a specialized culture achieved “individual competence” within a varied system (74–86); and he proposed a theory for “acquiring competence” that incorporated a wide range of skills based on “age, education, and association,” the latter of which he described as “the many forms of interpersonal contact that initially shape and continue to alter a musician’s knowledge” (110, 113). Brinner’s complex, comprehensive, and thought-provoking system combined accounts combed from other ethnomusicological studies with his own observations and interviews, while also recognizing the significant body of scholarship on music education (110–132). Yet the literature and his experience among Javanese gamelan musicians still led to a necessarily unfinished view of the process. Attaining musical competence, Brinner noted, required a great deal of time; and the varied ages of those who pursue it, and the multi-sited and multi-systemed nature of the learning process, made a truly comprehensive account difficult to document firsthand. Brinner’s caveats spoke to the limitations of ethnomusicological fieldwork, where projects tended more toward months-long snapshots of musical systems, and where extended, multi-year narratives often depend upon oral histories rather than continuous observation (110–111ff.). From within these limitations, however, Brinner extracted a textured, cross-cultural framework for understanding how musical specialists acquired their skills. His focus on the “progression and pace, processes and methods, agents, context, and means of acquisition” in musical training (115) offered an important structure for considering the sonic and social conditions by which people assumed musical roles in society.
Complementing Brinner’s ideas, Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s briefer study of Ethiopian Christian prayer leaders (däbtäras) offered perspectives on musical figures through a religious lens (Shelemay 1992). As Shelemay noted, däbtäras’ roles included musical ability as a defining skill, and local descriptions often pegged them as “musical” leaders; but däbtäras also served as examples of how “[t]he world and praxis of musicians often extend beyond musical performance into other realms” (1992: 256). Trained in churches and monasteries through repetitive memorization of text and chant patterns, däbtäras produced sound predominantly within a religious context. The däbtära’s status as religious musical authority, however, also allowed him to be a general officiant, and opened up additional spiritual opportunities such as healing ceremonies that went beyond purely musical training (254–56). Shelemay’s descriptions thus highlighted key issues about the way religious musical leaders integrated their sonic and spiritual responsibilities, particularly when seen from outside a strictly musical perspective.
Brinner and Shelemay moved the framework for understanding musical “becoming” from a predominantly socio-mechanical one to a more self-determined
