Golden Age Dreams
A Review of "Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era"
NEWS: For readers in the tristate area, this weekend I will be in New York City! On Thursday, April 4 at 7:00pm, I am giving a free public lecture entitled “Rossi in Moravia: Cantors in Czech Lands (1500-1750) at the Czech Consulate on the Upper East Side. Registration is free but required in advance. And on April 5-6, I will be the Cantor-in-Residence at Temple Gates of Prayer, where I will lead niggun-filled services together with my colleague, Cantor Moshe Bear, and give two talks: “The Sovereign Musical Self: Music in the Conservative Movement” and “The Fantastic & Surprising Origins of Music in the Torah.” Hope to see some of you there!
Also, last month I began to offer an option for paid subscriptions. This is encouraged but not required; Beyond the Music will remain fully-accessible and free to all who want to read it. Like supporting NPR or a museum you love, taking a paid subscription supports my unfolding journey of writing about Jewish music. For those of you who are moved to do so — thank you so much for supporting my writing. For those who are or remain free subscribers — thank you so much for reading and engaging with my work. I appreciate you all.
And now, for your regularly scheduled program.
Jeremiah Lockwood’s new book, Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers & Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era (University of California Press, 2024) is the culminating work of a determined and thoughtful advocate of cantorial music. The grandson of Cantor Jacob Konigsberg, Lockwood is a scholar-activist with a long history of academic achievement and musical creativity.1 This new work continues that trajectory, combining a thorough study of cantors with hints of an emerging musical ideology. At the center of his groundbreaking book are the stories of a small group of Hasidic singers in Brooklyn who are reviving Golden Age cantorial music through performance and recording, all while negotiating their countercultural love of this expressive art form within the skeptical world of Hasidic Judaism and the largely pop-music ethos of the Orthodox synagogues in which they serve.
Golden Ages is divided into four core chapters, broadly covering (1) cantorial sound recordings, both as they emerged in the Golden Age of Hazzanut and as re-animated today by cantorial revivalists; (2) a history and ethnography of cantorial pedagogy and nusach ; (3) the rewards and constraints of pulpit life; and (4) modern opportunities for cantorial performance and self-actualization via kumsitzes, online videos, and the concert stage. These chapters and interlaced with three ethnographic “interludes” from the lives of these cantors, showing the individual personality and approaches of each one to the tasks, contexts, and stakes of cantorial revivalism. Each chapter is not only a thorough academic intervention in the dynamics of cantorial artistry, but also a wide-ranging treatise on the very essence of Jewish expressive culture, revealing in each seam the threads of an unfolding vision for cantorial revival that aspires to re-animate and transform the bodies of the Jewish people as part of an unrealized cultural redemption and aesthetic eschaton.
The stakes of the book are thus incredibly high. As an ethnographer, Lockwood has the challenge of participant-observation, seeking to be an impartial and truth-seeking scholar while simultaneously honoring the stories and commitments of these cantors for whom Lockwood has been a fan, friend, collaborator, and producer. Lockwood balances this academic orientation with ample self-awareness of his utopian ideals for chazonus, the countercultural genre which runs through his blood as an artist and a cantor’s grandson, and which is the philosophical nusach giving both musical and ideological shape to his life. The author succeeds admirably at both of these goals.
It is hard for me to be fully impartial regarding this book. Dr. Lockwood and I were partners in forming the new digital Cantorial & Synagogue Music Archive (which he almost exclusively developed and curated), and I have deeply appreciated his care and stewardship of elder cantors and their manuscripts, particularly my late teacher, Robert Kieval z’’l. You can read more about our project here.
As a fellow cantorial philosopher, I know that I cannot fully do justice to this book in one review. The volume does what few Jewish musicians dare: to look deeply and critically at the sociological, ideological, and spiritual implications of their musical commitments. Lockwood thus captures in both historical perspective and ethnographic detail the roots of Jewish musical artistry as an individually-empowering discipline, with effects that often spill over into nonconformism. With the waning of the empire of Eastern European sound in American streets, Lockwood thus looks to this revival as holding the roots of a renewed Jewish civilization united by the search for one’s individual voice refracted through the ideals, sounds, and stories of our cantorial ancestors. I will add my own editorial tablecloth to this Shulchan Aruch of cantorial ethnography, with hopes that it will encourage and enhance discourse on its worthy and well-researched goals.
What may strike the reader in Chapter One are the sensitive hearts of Lockwood’s cantorial subjects, which include Hasidic cantors Yanky & Shulem Lemmer, Shimmy Miller, and Yoel Kohn. The strictures of Hasidic Judaism allow few outlets for creative personalities, and Lockwood reports empathetically on how chazzanut serves as a sacred container of feeling and expression for sensitive youths and future cantors. The “marked” identity of these Hasidim can lead one to false assumptions about why one of themmight pursue cantorial singing. As Lockwood discovered with humanizing self-awareness and perspicacity, these cantors sought out chazonus on their own terms, claiming “the right to pursue abstraction and pure aesthetics” without requiring reference to their group identity.2 This first chapter further outlines the dynamic and often transgressive history of the Golden Age of Hazzanut, expanding on Lockwood’s earlier work on the battles between cantorial superstars and conservative cantors like Pinchas Minkovsky and Elias Zaludkowsky. This latter group castigated Golden Age artists for their commercial recordings and populist, even vulgar performance choices, desacralizing and degrading their sacred art outside of the synagogue.
Cantors of all movements reading this book will heavily identify with its third chapter, “Cantors at the Pulpit: The Limits of Revivalist Aesthetics.” Here, Lockwood describes how Hasidic cantors must adapt and “code-switch” into the pop-music and congregational singing ethos of today’s Orthodox synagogues. Orthodox pop developed its distinctive style in the twentieth century with singers like Mordechai ben David, Avraham Fried, and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, and dominates the musical ethos of the Orthodox world. Lockwood thus explores the nonconformist, countercultural, and even morally suspect nature of Golden Age cantorial music in these pop environments. Like all cantors, these Hasidic cantors must bend and compromise their artistic passions and personal fulfillment in order to do “was der publik will” (what the people want).3
The book’s final chapter (“Conclusion: Cantors and their Ghosts”) is where the future implications and unfolding dreams of this cantorial revivalism are pondered, in a rich coda suggesting the outlines of a cantorial manifesto. One can feel Lockwood’s redemptive vision for a revived cultural empire of chazonus — mimetic and pluralist; celebrating in women, minorities, and other marginalized groups; drawing upon multiple artistic and ideological lineages marshaled in the construction of identity; and musically transforming Jewish bodies into critical, if not radical others within an emerging post-Ashkenazic utopia.
Lockwood's description of the foils of this vision — the professionalized cantorate — is the one part of his magnum opus which strums chords that have questionable historical harmonies. As a phenomenologist of expressive and nonconformist art, Lockwood depicts with colorful and critical prose the institutions of the American cantorate, as well as its Allfather, the Viennese modernizer Salomon Sulzer (1805-1890). Yet these depictions often come with historical omissions that more easily allow these institutional figures to play the role of “the Man”— the bourgeois champions of cantorial respectability and formalism against which rock-star cantors of all Golden Ages must authentically and rightfully rebel.
The real story is more subtle and elucidating. Salomon Sulzer, though a commanding force the professionalization of the modern cantorate, was also a nonconforming musical populist — composing art songs & patriotic anthems for the Austrian public, secretly performing Schubert lieder for decades following a congregational ban, and developing a public image as an eccentric equestrian. The twentieth-century cantorial schools and unions which arose to domesticate the cantorate were not simply agents of gelding the Golden Age cantorial id for “respectable” synagogue life, but were “big tents” of ideological and aesthetic commitments, ranging from Eastern European conservative traditionalists to reformers advocating significant aesthetic modernization based on American and Israeli national cultures.
These issues go beyond aesthetics to those of class and labor. The Cantors Assembly (CA) in particular was also a fierce labor union that sought to protect cantors from abusive synagogue hiring practices and exploitative agents, and which successfully advocated in U.S. Federal Court for cantors nationwide to receive ministerial status. While professionalization ultimately opened the American cantorate to less artistically-driven leadership, it also took itself to be the advocate for the common cantorial worker rather than the celebrity. As the longtime CA Executive Vice-President, Cantor Samuel Rosenbaum quipped: “the Golden Age was only golden for a select few.”
Lockwood’s occasional obscuring of this narrative is enmeshed with two elements that do draw a stark contrast between the institutional cantorate and Golden Age revivalist ideology. Both movements, to varying degrees, value musical artistry and commitment as essential charges of the cantor. Yet the institutionalized cantorate as found in the American movements and their Sulzerian ancestors connects more directly with two countervailing ideals: nationalism and music literacy.
Cantors influenced by nationalism over the past two centuries followed the lead of their co-territorial European host countries, creating essentialized canons of folk and synagogue music which they ennobled with the tools of Western theory to create a dignified “national music.” This process of modernism and musical nationalism was pursued both by conservatory-trained Eastern European cantors and Western European cantors alike. In the mind of Franz Lizst, it was engaging in this process which made Cantor Salamon Sulzer unique among his musical co-religionists as capturing authentic Jewish national sound. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the institutionalized cantorate, its synagogues, and its organizations also largely took on not just musical styles but also the non-profit norms of their host cultures, always attempting to situate a Jewishness that was both of and not-of its place of residence.
For Lockwood, the nationalist tendencies of such cantors as Sulzer, Pinchas Minkovsky and even Leib Glantz run against the grain of the subversive, sonic otherness of the Golden Age revivalist paradigm, based as it is in the sonic filling of the human ear with embodied experiences of cultural alterity. Lockwood relies on the aesthetic multitudes inherent in chazonus itself, which broadly encompasses folk music, entertainment, lieder, opera, and Ashkenazi sacred chant. But the institutional cantorate’s additional commitment to European, American, and Israeli nationalist musical forms renders it unpalatable to Lockwood’s project, and a milquetoast source of alterity compared with the otherness of Golden Age cantorial sound.
The second distinguishing feature of the institutional cantorate — musical literacy — is critical as well. As Lockwood points out in Chapter Two, it is the recording — whether “live davenning” or LP — that is the primary source of aesthetic orthodoxy, cultural captial, and artistic aspiration in cantorial revivalism. This points to a largely oral music culture based on relationality — even if it is relations with the ghosts of cantors past.
Lockwood quotes Cantor Samuel Vigoda’s ideal of “Hazzanut HaRegesh” — cantorial singing of feeling — as the marker these Eastern European cantors in their “stalwart” traditionalism.4 The late cantorial scholar, Joseph Levine z’’l (1934-2022), contrasted this term with the Hazzanut HaSeder, the “orderly” hazzanut of Western European cantors, and the new ideal (embodied in his teacher, Abba Yosef Weisgal) of Hazzanut HaSefer - “cantorial singing of the book.” This last term points to a philosophy, particularly among the Seminary-trained generation of cantors, to render a cantorial style whose floridity and expressiveness was logogenic — loyal to the meaning of the traditional prayer texts. Here we find the alternative construction of community based on the written word and the book rather than the gramophone. Samuel Rosenbaum was a fan of many cantors of the Golden Age, but his innovation through the Cantors Assembly was to publish dozens of volumes of their traditional material in music notation.5
The cantorial book (or even manuscript) also carries with it the same threat of all movements of literacy - detachment from the relational, oral culture that originally produced the form. Thus the conservatory and seminary, based in book learning and music literacy, largely displaced the experiential and apprenticeship-based learning models that produced the cantors of the Golden Age generation. While notated cantorial music may attempt to capture its idiomatic style, the silence of the paper itself ultimately leaves Lockwood’s cantorial ghosts less agency with which to possess the singer. Thus the norms of music literacy in the institutional cantorate potentially marginalize the spectres of the Golden Age soundscape.
Jeremiah’s Lockwood book stands, in my opinion, as the most insightful book about the dynamics of the cantorate and Jewish expressive culture since Mark Slobin’s Chosen Voices: The Story of the American Cantorate (1990). Its wide-ranging observations should cause a stir within Jewish musical circles and especially within the cantorate itself. Cantors and cantorial enthusiasts of all types should surely pick up the book, which is free to read online, to see what they find out when they look in Lockwood’s empathetic mirror to the cantorial soul.
You can learn all about Jeremiah’s story, scholarship, and activism in this new (4/1/24) interview on Samantha Cooper’s wonderful Jewish musicology podcast, Sounding Jewish: https://rss.com/podcasts/soundingjewish/1381194/
This reminds me of an illustrative anecdote by a congregant at my first pulpit in Bethesda. The man, a molecular biologist, also davened (prayed) every day. Many people would ask him about how he could reconcile these two parts of his life — davening, conceivably about faith, and science. He rejected this dichotomy in a similar way, pointing out that his life as a davenner is like a hobby; we don’t typically ask people to justify their hobbies or aesthetic pursuits based on other parts of their life.
The great irony is that both institutional and golden age cantorates have suffered the same fate — a release of expressive energy prior to decline. This follows one critiques of cantorial revivalism cited in Golden Ages — that it is a gesise, a “last gasp” of an ever dying art form. This reminds me of what historian J.G.A Pocock wrote about Golden Ages when describing British historian Edward Gibbon’s depiction of the Roman empire at the time of Juvenal:
“In so paradoxical a vision of history, there were no golden ages, but only golden moments at which the creative had not yet begun to destroy. Gibbon’s Age of the Antonines is a silver moment of this kind, a moment of relaxation in the downward swing of a civilization.”
Quoted in Golden Ages, 29.
Sam himself was an excellent writer. You can find a free edited volume including his biography and excerpts from his publications here.