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 Jewish communities within a single location.
Nusach, these studies show, holds a meaning and emphasis that shifts depending upon the context. I therefore will focus on presenting the concept as it came up in situ at the School of Sacred Music, usually in relation to other closely associated concepts (such as “modes” and “Traditional repertoire”), rather than try to isolate these instances into a chapter of their own. By presenting the idea in its many forms, I hope to emphasize the richness of nusach as an insider term: a hovering presence within the cantorial program that helps bring together imperfectly corresponding musical concepts under a common, if ambivalent, rubric.
The issues of nusach in this environment provide a classic illustration of the nexus between “insider” and “mainstream” academic discourses. Although students strived to become vessels of Jewish musical tradition, they also expected to become music scholars in the Jewish world, learning research and analysis techniques analogous to those used by Slobin, Summit, and myself. Invested in nusach for professional purposes, they had to discern how nusach fit within the cantorial culture; and they experienced nusach through a number of means, including articulated Western musical analyses, practical, imitation-based methods, performance, and less easily rationalized ideological discussions. The School thus became both a site for exploring nusach, and, through its students and curriculum, an extension of the academic studies already undertaken in this field.
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To Fashion a Cantor
For 2000 years, the cantor has served as the Jewish people’s prayer leader before God, as composer of liturgical poetry and song, and as educator and communal leader. Today, the cantor is part of a professional synagogue team working to enhance Jewish life.… As a calling and a career, the cantorate continues “to wed the worlds of spirit and art”—the mission for which the School of Sacred Music prepares its students.
—Publicity Brochure for the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion School of Sacred Music, c. 1999
As framed by the School of Sacred Music, the figure of the cantor at the start of the twenty-first century served as a force for maintaining Jewish religious musical traditions, and a powerful public symbol of Jewish religious continuity. This portrait, cultivated since the mid-late-nineteenth century, originally emerged as part of a trend toward scientific precision within Central and Eastern European Jewish scholarship. Cantors and other researchers, compiling over two millennia of written and spiritual sources, progressively distilled a cantorial figure from a wide array of titles, responsibilities, and musical concepts. Their work not only gave the cantor an identity, but also established a historical, social, musical, and religious space for discussing “Jewish” liturgical sound. At the twentieth century’s end, therefore, cantors increasingly saw themselves as figures both in history and of history. Through both publicity and action, they claimed on one hand an age-old embodiment of artistic sound within Jewish worship, and on the other hand a means for preserving and propagating that sound within contemporary society.
Before delving into the meaning of becoming a cantor within Reform Judaism, I will chronicle the layers of communal knowledge and activity into which the cantor has come to dwell. When combined, these layers establish a platform for creating the “modern” cantor, ultimately supporting the intentions and ambitions of the School of Sacred Music’s founders in the 1940s, and continuing to shape the meaning of the cantorate ever since. During the time of my research, these well-defined contours of cantorial scholarship provided an ethnohistorical and religious framework for anchoring emerging cantorial identity.
The idea of “Jewish history,” as David Biale has argued, implies a quest for a unified narrative—one that somehow threads together a varied and far-flung series of populations and cultural practices across space and time (Biale 2002: xxiii–xxiv). To consolidate these communities through a common set of religious beliefs, ideologies, experiences, or genetic traits requires a great deal of nuance and imagination. Yet people have sought a common “Jewish” past and sense of experience for scholarly, personal, political, communal, and religious purposes. The cantorial narrative offers one example of this process, and illustrates the tensions involved in bringing together Jewish identity and history. Recent scholarly accounts have linked the cantorial figure over time to several different occupations (both amateur and professional), numerous leadership responsibilities and activities (religious or otherwise), many forms of knowledge and talent (not always musical), broad interpretations of moral leadership, and several types of musical aesthetics and repertoire. Combined and recombined in different ways depending upon the author and context, these broad attributes created a variable narrative inscribing the cantor with historical depth and an intimate knowledge of a Jewish sonic “essence.” The School of Sacred Music’s own publicity pamphlet, for example, began by promoting the figure it intended to produce as a link between ancient and modern Jewish life: at once a spiritual representative and a wage-earner, a member of the clergy and an artist, a figure for the ages and a figurehead for today. How and why the School brings these two thousand years of “cantorial” activity to the charge of the modern cantor offers insight into the ways a “usable past” (Roskies 1996) became the impetus for a useful, and perhaps forward-seeking, present.
