The taught reality of the cantor as the musical representative of Judaism thus remained constantly vulnerable and in flux.
The cantorial school, in this view, served as a strategic site for assessing and reconsidering the meaning of musical authority. Christopher Waterman, in addressing questions of musical tradition, has noted that “the temptation to read contemporary categories into the past, especially when authoritative scholarly sources and informants do it as a matter of course, is strong” (Waterman 1990: 369, emphasis in original). Cantors, a well-constructed category within organized liberal Judaism’s religious consciousness, benefited from that temptation: both as the communal voice of “tradition,” and as recognized members of what Reform Judaism described as “the clergy team.” Yet that category needed constant reconstruction based on contemporary ideologies of Jewish sound. In this respect, cantorial training existed as one side of a dialogue: What did a cantor need to have—and what skills and repertoire did the cantor need to acquire—to remain a voice of tradition to Reform Jews? This question would resonate throughout my fieldwork, in various sites across the movement, and most intensely among the developing cantorial students themselves.
Mapping the Cantorate
Cantorial training starts with the premise of travel: to become spiritual representatives of the Jewish people, cantors must first experience a sense of Jewish geography and history. The setting of Hebrew Union College’s School of Sacred Music therefore offers a fascinating interpretation of both the spirit and intention of George Marcus and Michael Fischer’s call for multilocale (or multi-site) ethnography (Marcus and Fischer 1986: 91). Existing primarily in two locations (at the Hebrew Union College campuses in Jerusalem and New York) the School integrates its activities through an overall organizational schema that assigns each location a role in the cantorial enculturation process. Students applied to the School with an understanding that they would spend their first year of study in Jerusalem, and then complete their training in New York. By linking these sites as intimate components of the educational process, the School of Sacred Music cultivated a dual appearance as both a small, enclosed, centralized community and as a spiritual approximation of the Jewish diaspora. These complementary visions provided an elegant and bounded institutional model that benefited from postmodern theoretical interpretations of transnationalism and compressed space and time.
During approximately three years of fieldwork in these two sites, the bulk of which took place between August 1999 and May 2002, I found myself conducting a form of cognitive multi-site ethnography as well. While I explored each physical location, I found my interactions with members of the community falling along four general modes of perception, depending upon the situation.
I made efforts first and foremost to establish myself as a graduate field researcher. Beginning with a letter of introduction to the School’s director, which led to approval of my project, this role helped me fulfill my own needs as a student in pursuit of the Ph.D. As I continued my fieldwork, my perspective as a trainee took on additional dimensions. On one hand, my student status and compatible age caused many students to see me as a peer. At the same time, I would sometimes use my “academic” persona to maintain a sense of critical distance from the other students while in classes; and several would watch bemusedly as I hurriedly took down notes during discussions, set up audio equipment, and meticulously explained my motivations in response to their questions. Over time, some students even assisted me by recounting situations they found particularly relevant to my research. My research presence also offered students and faculty a deeper view of ethnomusicology, which the School openly embraced as part of its academic agenda: the School’s ethnomusicologist on faculty (who also became a close friend and advisor during my fieldwork) initially introduced me to various instructors and students with a good-humored remark that “there’s more than one Jewish ethnomusicologist in the world.” These kinds of situations provided me a position within the School that “allowed” me to conduct research as I had been trained to do without causing a stir. The relative compatibility of my identity with categories of knowledge propagated at the School evinced both the School’s familiarity with the Western academic system, and the students’ comfort with that system’s educational process.
By January 2000, due to my continual presence in cantorial classes and the concurrent lack of tenors enrolled at the School, students began to invite me to participate in School exercises and student musical projects. These instances, combined with my knowledge of Reform Jewish liturgy and similarities in age and financial situation, helped me gain an identity as a marginal student within the program. By the end of the year, students publicly told me, “you really are one of us,” and many expressed to me their hope that I would apply to the School formally. After participating in several public choral concerts with the School’s students and faculty, moreover, some audience members unfamiliar with my status occasionally came up to me afterward to ask what year of the program I was in. This context allowed me to gain insight into the everyday issues students faced, including frustrations with the program and personal concerns that arose with faculty and other students. Interestingly, my marginal student status also allowed me to build trusting friendships with the students that, I believe, allowed them to understand me better as I shifted between my roles as participant and “academic” observer.
In April 2000, in an unrelated development, the School’s ethnomusicologist invited me to teach a cantorial school course on American Jewish Music during his sabbatical. I agreed, with my dissertation advisor’s consent, in part because it corresponded with my own already established academic status in the School. This third role introduced me to an administrative perspective of the School I otherwise would have never seen. In practice, it occasionally proved surreal: the lessons I learned organizing and teaching my first graduate-level class served both as professional development and as research material; and the students I taught and graded also served as my research associates (and a couple of these openly told me they decided to take the course because they “liked” me). Moreover, after a year and a half of viewing myself from the perspective of a student and an outsider, I found myself treated by the administration as a junior faculty member. Those whose graces I had depended upon for permission to conduct research at the School in the first place, and whom I had learned to revere through the my experiences as a marginal student, would sit around the table at faculty meetings addressing me as a (rather unnerved) colleague and including me in their conversations and administrative decisions.18
My relationship with the School also existed in a fourth, more personal dimension. In March 1999, five months before I began field research at the School of Sacred Music and just after my dissertation proposal received its approval, I became engaged to the daughter of a well-regarded Hebrew Union College professor who taught at the New York campus. Through this association, I also gained a familial connection to the institution I intended to study. One of the cantorial faculty joked with me later that my engagement serendipitously granted me and my work a degree of “protektsia” (a Hebrew term denoting fortuitous political connections). This relationship became even more pronounced when a number of students and administrators began to identify me as this professor’s “son-in-law.” While I do not know for certain the effects of this relationship on my research, I often suspected its precipitous timing smoothed my entry into the community somewhat, and perhaps set certain suspicions at bay regarding my sincerity and the nature of my project.
Thus, in a very short time, I gained perspectives in my research as an academic outsider, a marginal student, an adjunct faculty member, and a faculty relative—in essence, conducting research from four different and equally rich points of view. Though I constantly needed to negotiate my shifting identity carefully while in the field, I found that adopting a modicum of open flexibility allowed me to experience a much more vibrant and textured understanding of the School’s policies, values and practices than had I maintained only one “role.” Fieldwork, in my view, benefits from cultivating honest relationships in a mutual spirit of open inquiry. It is by its nature a messy process, but one that in its messiness opens up important realms of understanding.
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