Judah Cohen’s volume is an ethnographic study of the (primarily Reform) Jewish cantorial students at the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music (in Jerusalem and New York City), drawing on participant-observation, interview materials, discursive analyses, and historiographic work. Cohen’s work offers a nuanced view of cantorial students and faculty as individuals, and a sympathetic commentary on the School as an institution in the context of Reform Judaism. It is also a valuable account of structure and agency in the formation of musical authority, and an examination of the mediating roles of an insider scholarly institution.

Cohen aims to present the process of becoming a cantor, and to reflect on the ways musical authority is created (5), drawing on Benjamin Brinner’s analysis of attaining “musical competence” (6–7). Both of these aspects of his project point to identity as social action—the negotiation of a “cantorial” identity with other cantors, whose values reflect Western art music norms and erudite Jewish music traditions; and with congregations (and rabbis), who increasingly privilege popular and “participatory” musical forms.

Cohen prefaces his ethnography with a discussion of the historiography of the cantor, identifying the construction of 1880–1940 as a “Golden Age” of the cantorate. This “Golden Age” reflected Ashkenazic cultural practices and aesthetics, both in terms of what were understood as Eastern European orally transmitted cantorial practices and a high degree of vocalism by Western art music standards (33). Cohen also traces the history of the School itself, pointing to its early intent to serve all denominations as, in part, reflective and constitutive of a vision of the cantorate that spans all Jewish traditions and musical styles; and to its self-positioning as an elite educational institution comparable to its secular New York peers (39–41).

Cohen’s ethnography is structured around the curriculum of the School, tracing the passage of a class of cantors from pre-application to the School, through coursework and Practica, to their eventual ceremonies of investment as cantors. Cohen carefully attends to the students and faculty as fully human agents, constrained by and contributing to the structures of the School and cantorial tradition. For example, in presenting the application process, Cohen presents an extensive set of interview quotations from both applicants and faculty, reflecting on their particular stories and intentions; but he organizes these quotations around the stages of applying to the School, analyzing the institutional texts and practices with which students and faculty engaged at each stage. With writing strategies like these, Cohen orients us to each stage of cantorial education as a negotiation with tradition that shapes cantorial identity.

Cohen then follows cantorial students through their coursework, beginning with the construction of a cantorial community and tradition in the students’ first year, spent in Jerusalem, and continuing through their work in New York. Coursework focused both on practical skills such as cantillation of the Bible, learning nusach and improvisation; and on scholarly approaches to Jewish music, including its history and theory. Again, Cohen’s discussion is structured around institutional texts (such as the catalog course description for required courses) but focuses primarily on the navigation of tradition and meanings for students and faculty engaged with those texts. Some of Cohen’s most interesting fieldnotes and transcriptions of in-class conversation present faculty anecdotes on past cantorial faculty members and their practices (99). Cohen later offers an extended discussion of these anecdotes, suggesting that they help construct an overarching historiographic sense of cantorial tradition among students (210–217), highlighting the value of nusach and improvisation on the one hand, and Golden Age cantorial sounds and composition on the other.

Cohen turns to an examination of the Practicum, a set of required exercises in which students present worship services for other students and faculty, who then discuss and critique the presentations. Cohen characterizes the Practica, following Turner, as “performed ethnograph[ies]” (114–155) of subsets of cantorial tradition. Through the Practicum, Cohen presents textured descriptions exploring traditional and Reform cantorial practice. He discusses students’ planning for their practica, highlighting the ways repertoires and liturgies presented students with structured sets of choices to make. He presents issues of historically grounded meaning in cantorial performance as negotiated between students and faculty: text-music relationships, particularly with respect to Hebrew usage (134–141); synagogue modes as melodic and harmonic structures (156–176); and varied choral practices (177–196).

The sections on the Practica, because they are presented as a locus of discussion about what it means to be a cantor, offer Cohen’s strongest investigation of the tensions in cantorial tradition and practice. Cohen offers a discussion of how faculty and female cantorial students (often a majority of the School’s students) negotiated understandings of feminine vocality and the male-dominated history of the cantorial tradition. He focuses on acts of “translation” female students made (often prompted by faculty), such as transposition to appropriate ranges and careful work with vocal timbre, to bring across cantorial meanings with "a woman’s voice" (201–210). Similarly, Cohen describes the Practica as a site where cantorial students and faculty wrestle with the growing divide between the “full range” of cantorial practice, spanning Jewish movements, that the School constructs and the more popular and “participatory” worship styles cantors are often asked to deliver in Reform congregations (217–222). In both of these discussions, Cohen’s analytic comments highlight broad tensions and sympathetically present the School as a site for navigating them. While some might wish for a more direct and critical commentary—particularly concerning gender—Cohen’s gentle ethnographic presentation and commentary are, in my view, especially apposite given that he is working on a scholarly community that will have access to, and no doubt use, his work.

In sum, Cohen’s ethnographic work will certainly be of interest to scholars interested in Judaism (and Jewish musics). It extends Slobin’s study of the American cantorate (1989) in its close focus on the contemporary training and development of Reform cantors, and Summit’s study of congregational musics in several Boston congregations (2000) in its examination of the institutionalized (and contested) musical values of cantors. Ethnomusicologists and folklorists interested in American religion and ethnicity should find Cohen’s work useful in its focus on insider scholarly institutions, which here form a point of mediation between Reform Judaism and both secular and Christian society (including those societies’ musical institutions).

WORKS CITED

Slobin, Mark. Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

Summit, Jeffrey A. The Lord’s Song in a Strange Land: Music and Identity in Contemporary Jewish Worship. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2000.

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[Review length: 1075 words • Review posted on May 5, 2010]