A Legacy of Trust
A tribute to my teacher, plus thoughts on the destiny of cantorial libraries
This Tuesday night marks the second yahrzeit of my teacher and mentor, Cantor Robert Kieval z’’l.
Robert was a cantor’s cantor. He was incredibly steeped in the artisty, traditions, and social world of thecantorate, and left a legacy of high sacred artistry at his congregational home of B’nai Israel in Rockville, Maryland, and in retirement as a regular service leader at East Midwood Jewish Center in Brooklyn. Robert was a respected leader of the Cantors Assembly, serving as its President when the organization finally admitted women into its ranks. And Robert was a long-celebrated mentor of cantorial students as faculty at the H.L. Miller Cantorial School. He even served as the interim dean. During the early years of COVID, Robert’s love of the cantorial arts gave weekly inspiration to hundreds as he hosted The Listening Room, a gathering for enjoyment, analysis, and storytelling about recordings of great cantors. For those who are interested, my colleague Beny Maissner is hosting a special Listening Room program in Robert’s memory tomorrow night.
My friendship with Robert was forged over this shared love of chazonus and appreciation for its interpretive depth. Visiting him at his home in Rockville, and later in Brooklyn, we would go through old records, look at music, and share stories (mostly his stories) about cantorial history. Robert’s memories were of an age in which the air was thick with yiddishkeit and the sounds of Ashkesonic majesty; in which beauty and fealty to tradition were the sacred charge of the cantorate, inscribed in the hearts of hazzanim and in the grooves of countless old 78s. Even just talking to Robert was like smelling the spices of havdalah — a reminder of the sweetness of a special time, however separated it had become from the humdrum of the world.
Robert’s love to the cantorate was a central part of his life. When you’re that devoted to something, people can tell how much it matters to you. As a devoted student of hazonus and a widely-connected leader among cantors, people around him gave him something that is hard to come by: trust. And because they trusted his devotion to the cantorate, they also entrusted him with their music.
Robert was a collector at heart. But it was because of the trust of his teachers and colleagues that people gave things to him: cantorial manuscripts, books, posters, photographs, even items of clothing. All pieces of an intangible, fleeting, yet deeply spiritual legacy whose aroma was slowly dissipating into the modern air. Robert kept them all, and his home and office at JTS —three rooms of it — turned into treasuries of overflowing and even overwhelming cantorial riches, each with its own story.
What does one do with a library of such magnitude? And greater still — who among us can truly divine its secrets?
I. On the Destiny of Cantorial Libraries
The future of cantorial libraries is an uncertain thing. A few may find a quiet home at university, and yet an even smaller number will transverse the generations within a cantorial family. Jewish seminaries double as donation centers for such items, as students periodically pick through boxes of books and music given over to their institution. The donors are either retired cantors or the family of departed ones, all hoping that the musical contents within will be reanimated by a new generation. But most of these donated items, especially manuscripts, are destined either for obscurity —or the dumpster.
When I was departing my first pulpit in Maryland, I was tasked with going through the old boxes of my predecessor, Cantor Abraham Lubin. The majority of his library had lain dormant in the synagogue basement since he had arrived in Bethesda in 1990. These long-forgotten boxes from the first thirty-five years of Abe’s career were dripping with rich letters, ephemera, and rare materials. As I’ve written previously, I’m incredibly indebted to Abe for giving me his academic library on permanent loan, which included a full complement of Jewish musicological reference works and periodicals from his years of graduate study.1 But the basement material — twenty-eight additional boxes of personal papers, reel-to-reels, programs, music, and ephemera — was going to be thrown out unless I found it a home.
I was deeply fortunate that my colleague and former thesis advisor, Mark Kligman, arranged for Abe’s materials to be received and archived at UCLA. But this UCLA-ex-machina is the exception, not the rule. How many libraries, like Abe’s and Robert’s, filled with sacred fragments of cantorial civilization, are likely to be thrown out by administrators cleaning up the basement?
The fate of such great libraries is among the existential questions of the cantorate. As Jewish life makes its normal, generational pivot towards new aesthetics and styles, many cantors ask — whither chazonus? Will future generations one day again look to the 20th century’s achievements in sacred musical artistry for inspiration? And if they are looking, where will they find the music?
II. A National Cantorial Archive
Back in 2021, my colleague Cantor Joseph Gole had gut feeling that the great aesthetic achievements and musical treasures of the 20th century cantorate would soon be lost to obscurity. He shrewdly convened a star-studded ZOOM meeting of cantors, academics, and librarians to discuss the fate of such materials. Among those present, there were takers for the ephemera and for the recordings. But surprisingly, no one wanted the music.
I figured that even if we couldn’t (yet) find a physical home for the cantorial manuscript culture of the last century, we could at least create a digital one. So with the help and organizational savvy of my musicology colleague Judith Pinnolis, a plan for a national cantorial archive was drafted, which was eventually adopted by the Cantors Assembly. Thus the Cantorial & Synagogue Music Archive (CSMA) was born: archive.cantors.org.
In addition to creating an exciting and inspiring look into the treasures of cantorial civilization, this project gave me some decent experience in the realm of grant writing. To give you a sense of the archive, here’s the pitch (with contributions from Judy Pinnolis and from our curator, Jeremiah Lockwood):
The CSMA takes as its goal the preservation of the personal music manuscript collections of elder cantors, the establishment of an online archive of digitized manuscripts, and the creation of a website that will serve as a point of dissemination for important musical material. This new archival endeavor will insure a lasting home for the unique collections that cantors have spent lifetimes building and an opening to the world of hidden sacred musical treasures.
In the past two decades, Jewish music archives have developed a broad footprint online. This development has facilitated an ease and depth of engagement with the history of Jewish music by scholars and practitioners. Online omnibus sites for Jewish recordings have revolutionized access to sounds of Jewish life. Internet-based archives have emerged as an important source for new forms of collaboration between artists and scholars that connect the past and the future. The cantorial legacy is in need of a focused archival initiative that will open paths of engagement for a new generation of scholars and musicians.
The Cantorial and Synagogue Music Archive seeks to address this need. By cataloging and making accessible online the personal collections of written scores from important twentieth-century cantors who are still living, the CSMA will offer tools to researchers, cantors and musicians who wish to access the legacy of Jewish sacred music. We will accomplish this through:
Scanning and digitizing print materials
Assessing and analyzing the contents of each collection
Writing descriptive guides to the materials
Creating metadata for the collections and for individual pieces that can be searched by artist name, date, geographic location and liturgical context (i.e. Sabbath eve, Rosh Hashanah, etc.). The resulting database will allow for ease of use both by academic researchers and practitioners seeking liturgical resources.
Creating a network of hyperlinks for each item connecting the cantorial archival holdings to other online resources (i.e. recordings, images, and biographical data).
With primary support from the Cantors Assembly Foundation, Park Avenue Synagogue, the Lowell Milken Center for Music of the American Jewish Experience, Cantor Joseph Gole, and Cantor David & Joan Lefkowitz, and with web design by Jamie Katz, we created a robust archive of over 10,000 scanned pages of cantorial music— with Robert Kieval’s collection at the center.
Things you can find there now include —but are in no way limited to:
handwritten notebooks of cantorial recitatives and personal repertoires, like these of Kalmen Kalisch, Abraham Kantor, Jacob Rappaport, William Sauler, and Israel Alter;
pedagogical materials written by private cantorial teachers for their students, like ones that, Cantor Shimon Raisen wrote for cantors Sidney Shicoff and Charles Bloch, that Jacob Sherman used with his students at Jews’ College, London, or that David Roitman wrote out for his son;
choral manuscripts from Europe and America at the turn of the 20th century, like these from Jacob Lefkowitz and Herman Zalis;
original scores written by Abe Ellstein for WEVD, the Forward’s Yiddish Language Radio Station;
and decades of special services and music from Park Avenue Synagogue.
This barely scratches the surface of the archive’s materials, many of which represent the personal liturgical repertoires of working cantors in the twentieth century. The whole archive is searchable, and you can browse it by composer, cantor, or piece of Jewish liturgy. And users can individually input metadata for every page, allowing the cantorial community to enrich the archive with its own specialized knowledge.
The CSMA is pretty amazing. But none of it would exist without our curator in the cantorial trenches, Dr. Jeremiah Lockwood.
Jeremiah Lockwood is the world’s rising scholar of Eastern European hazzanut — both in its historic Golden Age and in its current revival amongst the Hasidim of Brooklyn. The grandson of Cantor Jacob Konigsburg, Jeremiah has been leaning into cantorial traditions for decades, both in his research and his performance life, including with his cantorial-futurist ensemble, The Sway Machinery.
Jeremiah knows and loves the world of chazonus with mind and heart. As lead researcher of the CSMA, he personally scanned and sorted through thousands of manuscript pages and old cantorial volumes, curated the CSMA website, and even got master cantors and instrumentalists to create new musical interpretations some of its rare manuscripts. Here’s trumpeter Jordan McLean playing Vehu Rachum by Jacob Rappaport (1890-1943) from the latter’s master notebook of recitatives (You can view the original manuscript here):
Like the CSMA itself, Jeremiah’s work deals a lot with the present and future of cantorial music in our society. His new book, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era, comes out in just two weeks. Showing the use of chazonus among young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community, Jeremiah “proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular.” This subversive side of chazonus rarely gets highlighted in the concert halls or seminaries. Yet, like all music, chazonus creates sonic space for expressing human freedom and individuality.
In many ways, it is this humanizing aspect of chazonus that is at the heart of this project. While I’m very grateful for Jeremiah’s accomplishments as the curator of the CMSA, what I’m most grateful for is his devoted time spent with Robert. When I recruited Jeremiah for the archive, I didn’t know that he and Robert lived walking distance from each other in Brooklyn. Over two years, Jeremiah not only stewarded Robert’s materials, but spent quality time with Robert himself, growing a meaningful friendship and interviewing him about the cantorate and the items in his collection.
A congregant of mine recently reminded me of the verse “v’hadarta et pnei zaken — you shall honor the face of the elderly (Lev. 19:32).” Making space for an elder to celebrate their life’s meaning and share their story is a truly precious thing. So I am grateful to Jeremiah not just for preserving this music, but for uniquely honoring Robert in service and friendship during the last two years of his life.
III. What Now?
The CSMA is up and running. But the funding dried up last summer. Going forward, what should be done?
The crisis of cantorial libraries still remains — there is no dedicated place to hold the manuscripts themselves, let alone preserve or disseminate them. Sometimes a university or seminary will take a collection, but who would know? There are likely hundreds of cantorial libraries of historic and artistic significance being held in synagogue basements, homes, and within families. There is no address—no ark—to save these materials from the flood of obscurity.
Recently, a congregant of mine entrusted me with the library of a departed colleague. Whenever this happens, I usually reach out to the cantorial students I know in order to find the printed books in this collection new homes. But when my congregant showed me this manuscript, I was bowled over:
This is a page out of the personal choir book of Daniell Markus Gangürsky, who from all accounts appears to have been a music copyist or choirmaster in Eastern Europe in the 1880s. This two-hundred page partitur, or choirmaster’s notebook, was copied from both oral and written sources, and gives a snapshot of the urban synagogue repertoire of Eastern Europe. There are little bits of Sulzer and Naumbourg, but far more from Eastern composers like Shestopol, Maragowsky (Rovner), Steinberg2, Minkowski, Roazumni, and Weintraub, and lesser known names like Yechezkel Zhitomir, Bachman, Berkowitsch, Rosmarin, and Gürewitz.3 There are even some string parts for Hanukkah klezmer music written out in the middle.
Sacred fragments of cantorial civilization like this will be the casualties of the next ten years — unless there is somewhere for them to go. And even better, some way for them to live on. The CSMA is a start — what is needed is a physical home, a larger vision, and the funding to make it happen.
Sometimes I think I should make this a job — to be the Aaron Lansky of cantorial music. I’m in the middle of a doctorate, so it is an odd time. But whatever happens, I know this: cantors need someone to trust, like Robert, and to know that their material and musical legacy will be in good and caring hands.
Abe was, and is, a lifelong learner. Over his long career he received degrees from the London School of Jewish Studies (then called Jews' College) Cantorial School, the London College of Music, the College Conservatory of Music of the University of Cincinnati, and DePaul University. He was ABD at University of Chicago when he made the move to Bethesda in 1990, and his PhD story ended there. I’m hoping to take Abe’s books, along with his legacy of cantorial scholarship, across the doctoral finish line.
This could be David Moshe Steinberg, but it is not likely. The owner of this partitur after it was copied was a cantor named Chatzkele Oransky (HaShatz Yosef Aryeh Oransky), and it appears he emigrated to America in 1890. Steinberg was born in 1871. One could make a more definitive claim by comparing the partitur against the known compositions of D.M. Steinberg, which have been both recorded and published.
Leonard Bernstein’s childhood music director, Solomon Braslavsky (1887-1975) described the music of many such Eastern European “orthodox” composers as amateurish and needing improvement:
“Since Orthodoxy is the first and oldest religious form of Jewish Services, there is no need to get any historical data on that. In order to evaluate the music of any Service, regardless of its religious form, we should acquaint ourselves with its composers first. The most famous composers of old-fashion Synagogue Services were Nisan Belzer and Zeidel Rovner. Both men were known to me personally as well as musically. They were gifted men, to be sure. Unfortunately, neither had any academic musical training. Moreover, their conception of solemnity was quite different from ours, so that in many cases their music was something less than synagogal. The various marches and dances which they used in order to dramatize and illustrate the text in certain compositions, like Veye’esoyu, Ato Nigleso, etc. could hardly evoke inspiration and religious feelings of a modern Jew. Although the above kind of dramatization may also be found in compositions of trained composers, like Naumbourg (S'u Sheorim), Abras[s], and others, but they were rather exceptions to the rule.
Yet, we must not ignore the music of Nisan Belzer and Zeidel Rovner. For when we leave the marches aside and look into their serious compositions, such as Avoda and Ato Nosen Yad by Belzer or M'loch by Rovner, one may find there genial ideas and plenty of inspiration. The same is true with the music of other known orthodox cantor-composers of that period, like Kolechnik, Shestopol, the choir leader-composers Poliakoff, Yakovkin and many lesser known names. However, unless skillfully revised, I could not suggest music by any of the above named composers for our modern Conservative Services.”
—Solomon Braslavksy, “Comparative Study of Music in the Orthodox, Conservative, adn Reform Synagogues,” Proceedings of the Sixth Annual Conference-Convention of the Cantor Assembly and the Department of Music of the United Synagogue of America (New York: Cantors Assembly, 1953): 47-8.
It seems to me that there are two options - the Milken Archive and the incredible Jewish Music archive at the National Library of Israel.
Wonderful work.