Golden ages : Chassidic singers and cantorial revival in the digital era
Keywords: Education.

This study examines the work of young singers in the Brooklyn Chassidic community who are engaged in revival of cantorial music, a style of recorded religious vocal music from the early 20th century. Their explorations of the Jewish music archive give shape to practices of self-cultivation that blur the line between aesthetics and ritual in ways that push at the norms of contemporary American Jewish musical life. Cantorial revivalists do not have an established home in any contemporary Jewish institutions where they can pursue their sacred music concept. Classic styles of cantorial music are not normative as part of ritual practice in the Chassidic community, nor in Modern Orthodox synagogues where the most successful Chassidic cantors are able to find employment. After attaining fluency in the sounds of early 20th century recording star cantors, Chassidic cantorial revivalists must learn other forms of Jewish liturgical music in order to hold employment. Instead of a linear narrative arc, the episodic quality of cantorial revivalist education involves a series of displacements of knowledge: Chassidic singers intentionally displace the ritual music of their birth community with a vocabulary derived from the archive of cantorial records, but then in the context of employment they must embrace localized prayer music practices instead of performing in their "target" area of expertise as interpreters of music learned from old records. American synagogues, including Orthodox institutions, have rejected the cantorial presentational style of prayer leading in favor of a participatory folk-pop liturgy that employs a framework of group singing of metered melodies. The classic cantorial style, as understood by revivalists, is an aestheticized version of Jewish prayer leading in which cantors function both as ritual leaders and as artists. Given its formal qualities as presentational music, stressing the division between performer and audience, cantorial revivalists frequently present their work in secular music making venues, such as concert halls or internet videos. "Out of context" presentations of sacred music allow cantorial revivalists to harness the associations of music venues with presentational performance to frame ritual music as a listening genre and for music audiences to be drafted into a sacred listening experience. I suggest that contemporary Chassidic cantors are not only reviving a style of music but are also engaged in a revival of a form of comportment in prayer that foregrounds the role of cantor as arbiter of sacred experience. For cantorial revivalists to achieve their musical goals they must interpolate audiences into an embodied emotional response to the musical cues of the prayer leader. Producing this kind of sacred music community, centered on the experience of listening to the archive, is a utopian aspiration that has not been realized by the revivalists, and perhaps cannot be achieved in the cultural climate of the American synagogue. This has not dissuaded singers from investing time and resources into self-cultivation of a musical practice with no clear home in the current moment