Conversations: A (Second!) Year in Words and Music

Over the course of the 2024-25 academic year, I have had the opportunity to share my research in a public setting through the Conversations blog, presented by the Lowell Milken Center for Music of Jewish American Experience. This is my twentieth and final entry for the series this season. As I log my last blog post for the second year of Conversation, I will take a moment to offer a summation of some of the themes I have touched upon.

My blog posts this year have derived from two areas of my work: archival research and ethnography with currently living artists. I have found these two areas to be stubbornly intertwined. In the world of Jewish music, the archive is a light sleeper and finds itself frequently entangled in the lives of contemporary people. This is especially true for the artists who I have been fortunate to be in conversation with for the blog series. My work as researcher and as a creative artist deals with the memory and lineages of Eastern European Jews and their descendants in the Americas. For artists in this musical terrain, images of the past play a constitutive role in forming new musical creativity. This can be seen both in the discourse of artists, and in their formal musical approaches.

The language Jewish artists choose to describe their new musical works are often framed as a kind of traditionalism or revival. This is true both in the work of contemporary artists in the klezmer and cantorial scenes, and in the writings of cantors and other Jewish music professionals who worked a century ago. For Pinhas Minkovsky (1859-1924), the firebrand cantor and cultural critic who presided at the elite Broder Synagogue in Odessa, his idiosyncratic definition of traditionalism was at the center of a critique of cantorial culture at the turn of the 20^th century. In my two blog posts that deal with Minkovsky’s controversial stances, I show how a conception of decorum in cantorial music that was part of a general turn towards European art music aesthetics in the synagogue, was framed as the true expression of Jewish prayer. In one post, I discuss Minkovsky’s writings about Cantor Nissan Blumenthal, his predecessor at the Broder, and in another I compile a group of texts translated from Yiddish about the Minkovsky driven “phonograph controversy.”

Minkovsky described his own work in the synagogue as a corrective against the low-brow tastes of the Jewish masses, in contrast to the refinement of his highly cultured and educated musical sensibility. He also memorably attacked other cantors for embracing the modern technology of the gramophone. The gramophone is described as a corruption of tradition that mixes the sounds and cultural sensibilities of the barroom and burlesque into the sacred art of khazones. In this way, Minkovsky was able to defer criticism of his own synagogue music innovations by casting his younger contemporaries as even worse sinners. In an example of the long shadow of Minkovsky’s anti-populist conception of tradition, I write in another post about Jacob Beimel’s New York based Jewish Music Journal, which ran from 1934 to 1935. In a move rejecting the populist cantorial music scene that characterized Yiddish New York, Beimel and his peers advocate for the development of an American cantorate focused on the aesthetics of European classical music. Beimel presented this stance as a form of traditionalism that would safeguard the sacred past against the demeaning “ignorance” of populist working class tastes in favor of a Jewish art music that would serve as a form of ethnic uplift.

In seven of my blog posts, I interviewed contemporary artists working with Jewish musical traditions. For these artists, texts, musical manuscripts, and, especially, musical recordings from the early years of mechanically reproduced sound constitute traditionalism. In contrast to Minkovsky and the cantors he influenced, the upholding of tradition has been mostly divorced from questions about the preservation of the morals and class status of the community. Instead, tradition has now come to be yoked to an archive of musical texts and a philosophy of adherence to the aesthetics of the past. This ethos of retrospection has its own ethical and spiritual charge, as a form of memorialization. In the Jewish context the work of rediscovery and reclamation of old sounds of the Yiddish world is frequently tied to a discourse of memorialization. Jewish music is a reparative against the loss of cultural heritage in the Holocaust and as a result of institutionalized modernization in Israel and assimilation in the United States in the post-war period.

In my previous blog post I highlighted the role of archival work in the career of David Lefkowitz, Cantor Emeritus of the Park Avenue Synagogue in America. Lefkowitz’s multi-faceted career included a role as champion of the work of David Nowakowsky (1848-1921), a choir director and composer whose work was guided by his own interest in preserving Eastern European cantorial traditions through synthesis with the musical ethos of late 19^th century Romanticism. And in another post, I noted the role of cantorial archives as the basis for non-institutional cantorial revivalism in the informal network of cantors I am involved in as founder of the new organization Khazones Underground, which I am developing along with cantor and composer Judith Berkson.

The northern Romanian region of Transylvania has played an outsize role in my mini-ethnographic essays for this series. In September of 2024, when I began writing, I had just come off the road with my friends, klezmer musicians Jake Shulman-Ment and Francesca Ter-Berg, performing and visiting folk musicians in Transylvania. Shulman-Ment spent a decade living in Romania and studying Romanian fiddle traditions. I later interviewed Shulman-Ment and his musical partner Abigale Reisman who have just released an album of their inspired klezmer violin duets. Earlier in the year, I reported on a lengthy conversation with klezmer musician Zoë Aqua, who has spent the last few years in Romania developing performance and research relationships with elder Romanian fiddlers and young revivalist folk musicians. For these American klezmer artists, the sounds of Romanian rural music has been a touchstone in trying to achieve deeper adherence to the musical sensibilities of a klezmer tradition that is only thinly documented in archival sources. Furthermore, they look to the image of the past to support a modernist discourse of folk music as a charged source for new acts of musical bricolage, to achieve innovation by accessing obscure or lost sounds of the past.

In other blog posts, I offered highlights from my archival explorations that highlight lost or endangered aspects of Jewish sound. In one post I compiled recordings of male Yiddish theater actors impersonating elder Jewish women praying in Yiddish. These ethnic parody records give a rare sonic imprint of the abandoned (and recently reclaimed) women’s devotional practice of chanting tekhines, Yiddish language prayers. In another post, I presented several examples of another form of Jewish musical speech, the chanted sermon style of the magid, Yiddish language preacher. And in another post, I offer a miniature anthology of anecdotes describing the life of meshoyrerim, cantorial choir boys, in the Eastern European Jewish context. I have also written two short essays based on my conversations with the descendants of important Jewish mid 20th century artists: the Malavsky Family Singers, who I have written about numerous times over the years, and the Twin Cantors, the proprietors of a once popular Jewish event venue in Brooklyn. These three posts are offered in the hopes that they can serve as introductory texts in classes about Jewish music and Yiddish culture that can crack the door on the internal diversity of Jewish life and artistic production.

In closing, I would like to dedicate this year’s edition of Conversations to the memory of Cantor Benzion Miller. His passing in February of 2025 marked the closing of a chapter of American cantorial music rooted in the sounds of the Eastern European tradition. Benzion was the last European-born cantor regularly performing long form cantorial services in the New York City area. While his absence has left a deep hole in the cantorial world, the role his cantorial choir played as a training ground for cantorial revivalists will continue to resonate into the future in ways that are both deeply traditional and completely unpredictable.