The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor: Musical Authority, Cultural Investment

By Judah M. Cohen

“Of interest not only to cantors and their teachers but also to rabbis, congregations and everyone concerned about the future of the Jewish community.” —Florida Jewish Journal

The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor provides an unprecedented look into the meaning of attaining musical authority among American Reform Jews at the turn of the twenty-first century. How do aspiring cantors adapt traditional musical forms to the practices of contemporary American congregations? What is the cantor’s role in American Jewish religious life today?

Judah M. Cohen follows cantorial students at the School of Sacred Music, Hebrew Union College, over the course of their training, as they prepare to become modern Jewish musical leaders. Opening a window on the practical, social, and cultural aspects of aspiring to musical authority, this book provides unusual insights into issues of musical tradition, identity, gender, community, and high and low musical culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 20, 2019
• ISBN: 9780253045461

Book preview

The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor

The Making

OF A

Reform Jewish Cantor

Musical Authority, Cultural Investment

Judah M. Cohen

INDIANA UNIVERSITY PRESS

Published with the generous support of the Helen B. Schwartz Fund for New Scholarship in Jewish Studies of The Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program, Indiana University

This book is a publication of

Indiana University Press

Herman B Wells Library 350

1320 East 10th Street

Bloomington, IN 47405 USA

iupress.indiana.edu

First paperback edition 2019

© 2009 by Judah M. Cohen

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

MANUFACTURED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

The Library of Congress has catalogued the original edition as follows:

Cohen, Judah M.

The making of a Reform Jewish cantor : musical authority, cultural investment / Judah M. Cohen.

p. cm.—(A Helen B. Schwartz book in Jewish studies)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-253-35365-8 (cloth : alk. paper)

1. Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. New York Campus. School of Sacred Music. 2. Cantillation—Instruction and study. 3. Cantors (Judaism)—Education. 4. Reform Judaism. I. Title.

MT4.N5H439 2009

296.4'62—dc22

2009012332

ISBN 978-0-253-04549-2 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-253-04547-8 (e-book)

1 2 3 4 5  24 23 22 21 20 19

For Rebecca, who has known the project from the start, and Rena (b. 2006), who witnessed its completion.

Contents

Acknowledgments and Attributions

Note on Transliteration and Transcription

INTRODUCTION: A Moment of Transformation

1. To Fashion a Cantor

2. Seeking the Tradition

3. Constructing a Tradition

4. Through the Prism of the Practicum

5. A Prism of Cantorial Sound

6. A Prism of Cantorial Identity

CONCLUSION: Cantors in Israel and the Structure of Musical Authority

Appendix A: Ashkenazic and Sephardic Pronunciation Table

Appendix B: Notes on Audiovisual Materials

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments and Attributions

As with any major undertaking, a book never results solely from the work of a single person. What appears on these pages (and accompanying materials) resulted from a lucky and benevolent confluence of individuals, all of whom devoted time and effort to see this project through. Without them, this work would have remained merely an intellectual adventure.

Kay Kaufman Shelemay guided my years of research with a steady hand and unending support. Her constant, positive involvement over the past years has influenced every page of this work. Thomas F. Kelly and Richard K. Wolf provided valuable and detailed comments, giving me the pleasure of mulling over my topic in numerous thoughtful and interesting ways.

In the field, I found a mentor, colleague, research associate, site advisor and academic sibling in Mark Kligman, who enthusiastically took me under his wing as I started exploring ideas about Jewish music in New York City. His insights, as a fellow Jewish music scholar, and as Hebrew Union College’s resident ethnomusicologist, have been invaluable to my understanding of the School of Sacred Music and its environment. He has opened many doors for me, both in my research and in the professional academic world.

I am grateful to Cantor Bruce Ruben, the current director of the School of Sacred Music, for generously sharing of his own researches and resources on the School of Sacred Music’s history. Dr. Gary Zola and Eleanor Lawhorn, at the Jacob Rader Marcus Center of the American Jewish Archives, also provided enthusiastic assistance in helping me locate and access material on this and several other fronts.

For facilitating my fieldwork in Israel, I owe much gratitude to Cantor Eliyahu Schleifer and Rabbis Michael Marmur and Shaul Feinberg. They graciously granted my requests to spend time at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion campus in Jerusalem, and let me sit in on classes, record religious events, and take part in every facet of campus life. Eliezer and Chava Shaykevitz, distant relatives but close friends, opened their home and offered to serve as my embassy as I learned to function within a new environment.

In New York, Cantor Israel Goldstein, director of the School of Sacred Music during my research, looked kindly on my project and took a chance by allowing a stranger into School life with little introduction. Thank you also to Cantors Robert Abelson, Richard Botton, Andrew Edison, Martha Novick, David Lefkowitz, Jacob Mendelson, Noah Schall, Benjie Ellen Schiller and Faith Steinsnyder—all master cantors and first rate mentors, who became my teachers in more ways than they know. Joyce Rosenzweig and Allen Sever, both extraordinary musicians, were equally helpful in their interest and assistance with my research.

My wife Rebecca has been a fellow traveler on this journey, constantly serving as a model of efficiency for me to follow. Thank you for your love, your companionship, your welcome distractions and your encouragement—not to mention your patience and insight into my theoretical rantings. Our daughter Rena, born in 2006, napped diligently as I worked on completing this book, and was probably keenly aware of my attempts to puzzle out another phrase or paragraph in my head as we played in the park or watched Sesame Street together.

My parents, Richard and Treasure Cohen cultivated in me the inquisitive, enthusiastic and deep-thinking spirit that led me to this pursuit, and continued to challenge me all the way through the process. Their support and love over the years instilled in me the confidence to strike out on my own path, even in the face of difficult times and long odds. Thank you also to Stanley and Edna Nash, who not only had enough faith in me to let me marry their daughter, but also have been supportive and caring in-laws, rejoicing in my successes and counseling me in times of hardship.

For helping to fund my research and travel, I am grateful to have received a Jacob K. Javits Fellowship, a John Knowles Paine Travelling Fellowship, and an Edward H. Kavinoky Summer Fellowship. Early in the writing stage, fellowships from the Whiting Foundation and Memorial Foundation for Jewish Culture offered important support, allowing me to pursue my endeavors full time; and summer faculty fellowships from Indiana University allowed me to concentrate on completing my manuscript. At the publication stage, I received generous assistance from the Helen B. Schwartz Fund for New Scholarship in Jewish Studies and the Faculty Fund of the Robert A. and Sandra S. Borns Jewish Studies Program.

I am also grateful to my music and Jewish studies colleagues at New York University and Indiana University, including my compatriots in NYU’s Working Group on Jews and Media (especially its conveners, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler). They all have given me the gift of a rich intellectual environment in which I could continue my work over the past six years. Both directly and indirectly, their conversations have helped shape my ideas for this and many future projects.

Janet Rabinowitch, my editor at the Indiana University Press, has been a steady force in moving this project along. Thank you also to Katherine Baber and Brian Herrmann, whose able hands and organizational prowess helped this manuscript (and this author) negotiate the complex publication process. Ruth Stone and Alan Burdette, moreover, have been instrumental in encouraging me to extend this project beyond the written word; as part of a connected initiative funded by the Mellon Foundation, I have been able to deposit and notate video relating to this book in the Ethnomusicological Video for Instruction and Analysis Digital Archive (EVIADA). I am grateful to Indiana University Press for its support of this new direction, which has rich implications for the future; users can access my material via a link on the IU Press website.

Most importantly, I wish to thank the School of Sacred Music graduating classes of 2000–2003, whose members graciously included me in so many of their activities, somehow managed to fit long interviews into their insanely busy schedules, and generously allowed me to record and observe their every move throughout the educational process: David, Margaret, Jonathan, Brad, Ilana, Amy, David, Daniel, Sergei, Diane, Michel, Susan, Rosalie, Lisa, Rebecca, Hollis, Wendy, Kari, Jeff, Seth, Alison, Jason, Jill, Larisa, Adina, Kim, Regina, Erin, Miriam, Sally, Galina, Tanya, Gabi, Mark, David, Jeff, Tracey, Kerith, Rosalie, Irena, and Leon. Their voices serve as the heart of this work, and their active engagement with this project as students, and later as established professionals, has been the greatest gift a researcher could have. Throughout, they trusted me with their personal opinions, aspirations, and concerns about the cantorial training process, and allowed me to be a part of their lives. I can only hope that I have given their words, and their experiences of cantorial training, justice.

Writing about the lives of developing musical figures holds significant challenge, particularly when, years later, those same people become prominent public authorities and representatives of their art. Few people are comfortable having others chronicle their formative experiences. I therefore offer my gratitude to a community that has endowed me with the generosity and trust to do just that. At the same time, in order to honor that trust, I have given my research associates the option to be quoted anonymously. This approach, I feel, still allows the reader an intimate view into the communal musical training experience, while acknowledging that opening such a window entails a great deal of sensitivity. In addition, I hasten to remind the reader that the personal quotations I include in this book represent a community’s thoughts during a formative time period, in a specific (often insular) environment, and at an early stage of professional development. They appear in the rough: as transcribed speech, with minimal embellishment, in order to remain as true as possible to the moment and circumstances in which they were expressed. I take full responsibility for any inaccurate or misleading contexts in which they appear.

Note on Transliteration and Transcription

The Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music exists within the world of American Reform Judaism. Thus, with the exception of citations from other works, I will transliterate Hebrew terms according to the Union for Reform Judaism’s own style sheet, the URJ Transliteration Guidelines and Master Word List (Corman and Person, 2005). This approach reflects the practices of the URJ Press (the publications arm of the Union for Reform Judaism), and consequently serves as the normative means by which the School of Sacred Music community represents Hebrew in English characters.

The written musical examples in this book appear in the same spirit. As an ethnomusicologist, I recognize the challenges inherent in giving sound a written form. Scholars who study music in other communities often shy away from using standard Western notation, since such an approach too often disregards the significance of local musical thinking processes. The cantor’s world has similar considerations: cantorial practice has long been seen as a phenomenon that entered the Western sphere with the modern era, and eventually translated itself onto the Western musical staff. Students and instructors at the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music have come to this legacy by relying heavily on oral transmission, while simultaneously valuing Western notation as a common currency for learning, distributing, and analyzing musical phenomena. I have attempted to follow a similar path in this book. Nearly all the musical examples I discuss appear on the accompanying compact disc. In addition, however, I have transcribed several selections in Western notation for closer analysis and consideration in a way that reflects the community’s musical thought processes. In a few cases I also use notation to reproduce abstract musical concepts developed within the Jewish musical world itself. By taking this approach, I hope to provide both a representation of the sounds produced within the American cantorate, and a sensitized consideration of what it means for cantors and cantorial students to make those sounds.

The Making of a Reform Jewish Cantor

Introduction: A Moment of Transformation

[W]hen my turn came, standing in front of [the President of Hebrew Union College] … and lookin’ in [his] eyes, and when he said [Are you up to the task of this?] to me, and I just kept nodding like: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. I felt certain about it.…

There was something transcendent about the whole experience … I think it will really stay with me. I mean I was thinking: Not everybody can be clergy. You are privileged. This is a real honor. And I remember thinking: Yeah, graduate and undergraduate … graduation was special. But this, this is something different.… This is a transformation.

—D. Yomtov, May 22, 2000

Sunday morning, May 21, 2000. The huge expanse of the sanctuary at Temple Emanu-El of the City of New York provided a grand resonating space for the pipe organ that signaled the start of the academic procession. From a curtained loft hidden high above the pulpit, a choir of students and faculty from the Hebrew Union College School of Sacred Music began to sing. And then, on cue, the graduating class of rabbinic and cantorial students from the New York campus of the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion processed in from the back of the sanctuary. Baruch HaBa B’Shem Adonai, the choir intoned in a setting by British composer Stephen Glass: Blessed is the one who comes in the name of God! Families and friends of the graduates stood in the pews on either side of the processional aisle, watching as the black-robed graduates strode toward the pulpit. Instructors and honored guests followed, several in full academic regalia. As they marched, the organist progressed through a succession of majestic compositions by both Jewish and non-Jewish composers.¹ Those officiating at the ceremony took their spots on the pulpit, while the graduates found seats in the front pews. When the procession finished, the organist found an appropriate place in the music to end, and slowed to a satisfying conclusion. The echoes trailed off.

From my place in the side balcony, I could differentiate between the degree candidates in each program with relative ease. Nearly all the twenty-eight rabbinic candidates had prayer shawls (tallitot) draped over their graduation robes, presumably to denote the spiritual gravity of their anticipated leadership positions. Of the ten cantorial candidates, in contrast, only three wore tallitot; the rest, to signify their completion of the Master of Sacred Music degree, wore pink master’s cowls.² Such attire offered a symbolic window upon the students’ expectations as together they commenced a Service of Ordination and Investiture, the ritual by which they would gain official status as religious leaders in American Reform Judaism (Service 2000).

The service, led by rabbinic and cantorial faculty from Hebrew Union College, differed significantly from the standard Jewish prayer ritual. Instead of moving through the normative parts of the Jewish liturgy, those gathered progressed through a series of readings, addresses and musical selections, all based around the ceremony’s chosen theme of Light. Written specifically for the occasion by a designated committee from the graduating class, and issued in booklet form to the graduates and attendees, the service outlined an emotional ascent, leading the congregation on a spiritual journey that would broadcast and reinforce Hebrew Union College’s values while adding meaning to the graduates’ impending titles. Participants recited lines emphasizing their devotion to Jewish history and teachings, heard cantorial and choral music setting key religious texts, and listened to warm greetings from Reform Judaism’s national leadership.

Once the preliminary prayers ended, the graduates rose, turned around to face the congregation, and intoned a responsive reading thanking family, friends and teachers for their roles in helping them reach this day. The faculty of the Hebrew Union College, seated right behind the graduating candidates, symbolically accepted their students’ imminent transitions into colleagues by completing the reading, as they declared together: Arise, shine, for your light has come (Service 2000: 6). With all but the final step completed, the graduates resumed their seats in the pews, silent in anticipation. The President and spiritual leader of Hebrew Union College rose from his place on the pulpit, came to the front of the raised platform, briefly addressed the assembly on the meaning of the graduates’ new responsibilities, and then commenced the annual ritual of Investiture and Ordination.

The President, alone, walked toward the back of the pulpit, climbing several steps to reach an imposing and majestic holy ark—the holding place for the synagogue’s Torahs, and the spiritual center of the sanctuary. He slid open the doors to reveal a number of ornately dressed Torah scrolls in a brightly lit vertical compartment. He bowed his head in silence for about a minute. Then he turned and descended the steps, ready to commence.

The cantorial students received their spiritual sanction first. Rising from their seats as a group, the graduates prepared for investiture, a process titled intentionally to express both similarity to and difference from rabbinic ordination.³

Cantor Israel Goldstein, Director of the School of Sacred Music, came to the reader’s desk at the front of the pulpit. Using a formal and tradition-laden term for cantor, he ceremoniously presented to the President the members of the graduating cantorial class, "who are to be invested as chazanim in Israel."⁴ Goldstein called the candidates up by name, one by one—first in Hebrew, then in English. As each mounted the steps on the right side of the pulpit, the organist began playing music specifically requested by the student. Their choices ranged from Franz Schubert’s An die Musik (1817) to a selection from Ernest Bloch’s Sacred Service (1930-1933), to a setting of Czech composer Ilse Weber’s Holocaust-era song Ich wandre durch Theresienstadt. Wafting softly throughout the entire sanctuary, the music reflected an intensely personal sonic environment. Only the cantorial students, their teachers, and their close friends and relatives could understand the meaning of what might otherwise have been construed as generic background sound.

Once on the pulpit, each student walked over to the President, who in turn led him or her by the hand up the steps to face the open ark. When they arrived, the two turned to each other, and the President placed his hands on the student’s shoulders. A larger than life and deeply intimate moment unfolded: even with the entire congregation witnessing the proceedings, students recalled the moment afterward with little memory beyond their immediate surroundings. Standing as if in tableau, the President spoke softly to the candidate, his words masked by the organ music.

For about forty-five seconds, the President and student maintained their silhouetted pose; perhaps during this time the candidate would nod his or her head minutely. Then the President turned his hands upward, firmly but tenderly holding the base of the student’s head. After around half a minute, he leaned forward, touching foreheads with the candidate. About fifteen seconds later they broke the tableau and embraced. The President led the newly invested cantor back down the stairs, where Goldstein, waiting, gave the graduate a diploma and a warm handshake. The new cantor would cross to the left side of the pulpit and descend back down to the floor level as the next candidate came up.

Several students returned to their seats in tears. Others openly showed a mix of gravitas and revelation, dwelling in the spiritual moment. Several hugged each other upon returning to the pew, having reached the final stage of a long journey.

All had been transformed. Culminating at least four years of intense study, they had gained the right to call themselves invested cantors, with all the responsibilities the title entailed. Together they had been embraced by the College—and, by extension, the Reform movement—as official representatives of the musical traditions of the Jewish people.

At a reception held afterward in the basement of an Upper East Side synagogue, family, friends, former instructors and current cantorial students congratulated the new School of Sacred Music graduates, proudly calling them by their long-awaited title of Cantor. It was a sign of respect, admiration, and accomplishment.

In the following years, these new cantors would explore the meaning of their spiritual labors. They would use their training to lead religious services, instruct congregants, and perform pastoral duties at the synagogues and other organizations that employed them. They would also build reputations as authorities on Jewish music through local concert appearances, special synagogue presentations, and performances of original, Jewish-themed works. Throughout, they would address questions first introduced during their years at the School of Sacred Music: What did it mean to be a vessel of Jewish music, particularly in a society that, they frequently found, held different ideas about the sounds of Judaism than what they had learned? How did their training prepare them for careers as pastoral leaders within liberal Jewish life? And perhaps most significantly, What had they become after their time at the School of Sacred Music?

In this book, I intend to explore that musical becoming—the process by which students learned, internalized, and then assumed the knowledge and abilities necessary to become communal, recognized, musical authorities.

Ethnomusicologists have long looked to musical authorities as crucial sources for understanding musical cultures: they have studied with them, marking musical growth under their tutelage as key parts of the participant observation process; and they have often used the knowledge and opinions obtained from these authorities as lenses for evaluating broader questions of musical style, structure, and social activity. Yet despite their centrality to the concerns of ethnomusicology, musical authorities have received relatively little critical scrutiny as figures who themselves had to undergo their own forms of musical transformation. Fieldworkers treated them as idols of sorts: the faces of musical practice, active symbols of musical tradition (often in opposition to modernity, external political and financial influence, or commercialism), and gatekeepers of musical knowledge. Ethnomusicology’s major figures included them prominently in their conceptions of the field: Alan Merriam devoted an entire chapter of his seminal 1964 book The Anthropology of Music to establishing these authorities as specialists (1964: 123–144), and Mantle Hood, in his textbook The Ethnomusicologist, emphasized finding and working intensively with teachers as a first priority for fieldworkers (1982[1971]: 212, 230–246). Important as such interactions became to fostering cultural and musical understanding, however, they also created spaces of ethical ambivalence, particularly if the musical authority’s status came to be seen a cultural variable in itself. After all, according to what standards did a musical authority come into being in the first place? Questions of how such authorities gained their stature all too frequently fell outside a research project’s analytical frame, receiving at best anecdotal treatment, and taking a necessary back seat to inquiries about less sensitive (and potentially less self-undermining) areas of musical tradition and style.

In this book I aim to take a deeper look into the creation of musical authority by scrutinizing the process by which one such figure, the Reform Jewish cantor, gains identity and prestige. Musical leaders do not simply come into the world—they must undergo extensive periods of training and transformation to develop specialized skills, gain a social network, and fall in line with a sense of historical expectation, all while displaying the ability, the spiritual resolve, the personal tenacity, and the talent (or a similar intangible factor) to achieve some form of success. The process often requires those who seek authority to dwell in a state of vulnerability, where they can change their habits, their beliefs, their techniques and their philosophies on the whim of a comment in order to satisfy an instructor. Yet they must also make their own choices throughout, and take on challenges of increasing complexity. From the first identification of potential, to the opening stages of initiation, to entrance into an accepted educational framework, to rigorous and complex negotiations of identity, to successive tiers of achievement and skill, and finally to the completion of the training process, students enter into relationships with one or many instructors under the presumption that after sufficient time and practice, they will cross the threshold from disciples to colleagues. The path toward musical authority therefore involves not just a reciprocal commitment from other authorities, but also the students’ investment in an uncertain but hoped-for future.

The training process toward musical leadership thus outlines a broad spectrum of variables. Becoming a musical leader requires an individual to adopt some notion of a longstanding tradition; but it also requires student and teacher to mediate, refine, redefine, and challenge that tradition throughout a prolonged process of transformation. The centralized and esoteric nature of the training process keeps much of the tradition insulated from broader cultural activity and public opinion; musical leadership, however, also relies on a public trust built by meaningfully presenting that tradition to the broader community. Any changes to repertoire, technique, and style happen under the watch of accepted practitioners, and hold greater meaning than the practices of musical outsiders; yet musical outsiders have often compelled musical authorities to reconsider their aesthetic values to maintain relevance in their communities. As understandings of the tradition inevitably shift over time, the learning process and its associated collective of practitioners become key factors in keeping it specialized, distinct, and intact; and yet the learning process also brings new people, new ideas, and new forms of flexibility into the tradition.

Several scholars have addressed the complex subject of musical training and the attainment of musical authority. Benjamin Brinner, for instance, described the idea of attaining what he called musical competence as:

… individualized mastery of the array of interrelated skills and knowledge that is required of musicians within a particular tradition or musical community and is acquired and developed in response to and in accordance with the demands and possibilities of general and specific cultural, social and musical conditions. (Brinner 1995: 28; italics inverse of original)

Brinner, in exploring the components of musical authority, detailed a model for knowing music, denoting domains such as sound quality and symbolic representation as skills that required specific attention (40–41); he suggested ways by which musicians within a specialized culture achieved individual competence within a varied system (74–86); and he proposed a theory for acquiring competence that incorporated a wide range of skills based on age, education, and association, the latter of which he described as the many forms of interpersonal contact that initially shape and continue to alter a musician’s knowledge (110, 113). Brinner’s complex, comprehensive, and thought-provoking system combined accounts combed from other ethnomusicological studies with his own observations and interviews, while also recognizing the significant body of scholarship on music education (110–132). Yet the literature and his experience among Javanese gamelan musicians still led to a necessarily unfinished view of the process. Attaining musical competence, Brinner noted, required a great deal of time; and the varied ages of those who pursue it, and the multi-sited and multi-systemed nature of the learning process, made a truly comprehensive account difficult to document firsthand. Brinner’s caveats spoke to the limitations of ethnomusicological fieldwork, where projects tended more toward months-long snapshots of musical systems, and where extended, multi-year narratives often depend upon oral histories rather than continuous observation (110–111ff.). From within these limitations, however, Brinner extracted a textured, cross-cultural framework for understanding how musical specialists acquired their skills. His focus on the progression and pace, processes and methods, agents, context, and means of acquisition in musical training (115) offered an important structure for considering the sonic and social conditions by which people assumed musical roles in society.

Complementing Brinner’s ideas, Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s briefer study of Ethiopian Christian prayer leaders (däbtäras) offered perspectives on musical figures through a religious lens (Shelemay 1992). As Shelemay noted, däbtäras’ roles included musical ability as a defining skill, and local descriptions often pegged them as musical leaders; but däbtäras also served as examples of how [t]he world and praxis of musicians often extend beyond musical performance into other realms (1992: 256). Trained in churches and monasteries through repetitive memorization of text and chant patterns, däbtäras produced sound predominantly within a religious context. The däbtära’s status as religious musical authority, however, also allowed him to be a general officiant, and opened up additional spiritual opportunities such as healing ceremonies that went beyond purely musical training (254–56). Shelemay’s descriptions thus highlighted key issues about the way religious musical leaders integrated their sonic and spiritual responsibilities, particularly when seen from outside a strictly musical perspective.

Brinner and Shelemay moved the framework for understanding musical becoming from a predominantly socio-mechanical one to a more self-determined (or emic) transformational one, bringing technical and social development together with personal investment and phenomenology. Ethnomusicology has much to offer on this topic; but many of the most vibrant examples come from accounts of how researchers themselves became transformed through their musical experiences. Early ethnographers prided themselves in their efforts to see through the eyes of the people they studied, partly as way to reinforce an authoritarian point of view.⁵ By the 1950s, as ethnomusicology began to establish itself as an academic field in the United States, Mantle Hood and others promoted a somewhat less presumptuous version of this approach. Understanding a musical culture, in their eyes, meant encouraging students to experience a community’s music from within, often before embarking upon any other form of social research. Hood’s approach gave young fieldworkers the opportunity to acquire musical competence firsthand, while promoting facility in a second musical language as a form of currency within the discipline (1960). Students’ time with local instructors helped them understand more authentic forms of musical transmission; and upon their return from the field, the relationships they forged, combined with their musical experiences, would be so deep as to render them potential teachers of the tradition themselves. Institutions of higher education, perhaps inspired by Hood’s world music ensemble activities at UCLA, increasingly began hiring ethnomusicologists to lead performing groups in their specialty areas, likely as a way to enhance the international flavor of campus and community life (Trimillos 2004: 24–25).⁶ These activities positioned ethnomusicologists, at least in the public eye, as ambassadors (or at least local consuls) for cultures to which they only equivocally belong (Solís 2004: 12) and practitioners of the musical traditions they studied.

As musical ethnography began to shift in the 1970s and 1980s from a method based on objective reportage to a more reflexive form of expression, ethnomusicologists increasingly began to add personal thoughts and feelings about the fieldwork process into their publications.⁷ First person accounts would reinforce the subjectivity of the fieldworker’s gaze in portraying cultural activities. Ethnomusicologists, as a result, could no longer appear as a neutral presence in the communities they studied. Instead, increasing numbers of researchers portrayed themselves as actors in a more complex model of cultural interaction. Acquiring musical skill, in this light, became a site of ambivalence, striking directly at the ethnomusicologist’s sense of legitimacy as a representative of an Other’s musical culture.⁸

One of the most dramatic and effective attempts to document this ambivalence appeared in Michael Bakan’s stirring, nearly novelistic account of his own experiences as a student of Balinese gamelan beleganjur drumming (Bakan 1999: 279–333). In an extended narrative, Bakan described in detail his several month relationship with his drumming teacher, the educational models he and his teacher employed in imparting musical information, and the issues he faced as an American trying to internalize an art form far more commonly taught to other Balinese. What distinguished Bakan’s narrative from other similar descriptions of music learning in the literature (see, for example, Berliner 1979) was the intense scrutiny he placed upon the phenomenological process of becoming a beleganjur drummer. Amid all his ruminations and discussions of educational and cultural difference between himself and the Balinese, Bakan described continually improving at his craft—in fits and starts, and by working through several setbacks. The most substantial moments of realization, which he framed as tuning-in experiences (316), somehow stemmed from his practice and study, yet went beyond rational explanation. After a significant amount of build-up, Bakan’s narrative climaxed in a triumphant drumming session, which he called A Transformative Moment (323). [F]or one brief moment, at least, he noted,

I have been able to move to some deeper place; into the experience of a more profound musical awareness than I had known or known existed; to a musical realm where the technical, the precise, the well-wrought, the beautiful, have become something other than what they seemed: reflections and embodiments not of themselves, but of a deep commitment and trust, of a transformation into a communion where we do not remain what we were before. (328)

Just as with the cantorial students at the start of