Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era

Jeremiah Lockwood

Univ of California Press, Feb 6, 2024 - Family & Relationships - 206 pages

"Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era is an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the gramophone-era cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. The book proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community. Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community and the aesthetics of prayer in contemporary American Jewish synagogue life outside the Hasidic world. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, "golden age" cantorial music offers a model for aspiring Hasidic singers of a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority were aligned. The musical lives of contemporary cantorial revivalists suggest new ways of thinking about the meaning of the work of gramophone-era cantors. Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the cantors of the golden age as a precedent for musical and social practices that defy institutional authority and push at normative boundaries of sacred and secular by foregrounding artist's voices in the culturally intimate space of prayer"--

Contents

• I didnt know what I was craving until I found it 1 Animating the Archive Old Records and Young Singers 23 1: 23
• Cultivating Skill and Ideology in the Cantorial: 56
• The Limits of Revivalist Aesthetics: 77
• Stages of Sacred Listening: 114
• Making Golden Ages the Album: 130
• Cantors and Their Ghosts: 151
• Glossary: 177
• Index: 191

About the author

Jeremiah Lockwood is a scholar and musician, working in the fields of Jewish studies, performance studies, and ethnomusicology. He is currently a Fellow at the Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Both his music performance and scholarship gravitate toward the Jewish liturgical music and Yiddish expressive culture of the early twentieth century, and the reverberations of this cultural moment in present day communities. Lockwood’s research considers the work of cantors as arbiters of social, intellectual, and aesthetic change in times of crisis and cultural transformation. Jeremiah received his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 2021. Jeremiah was a 2022–23 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Fellow, where he conducted research on the khaznte phenomenon of gramophone-era women performers of cantorial music and composed a new piece of music responding to this fecund moment in Jewish musical history. Jeremiah has recorded more than a dozen albums over a music career that spans decades with his band The Sway Machinery and other projects.

Bibliographic information

• Title: Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era; Volume 3 of University of California Series in Jewish History and Cultures
• Author: Jeremiah Lockwood
• Edition: illustrated
• Publisher: Univ of California Press, 2024
• ISBN: 0520396421, 9780520396425
• Length: 206 pages
• Subjects: Family & Relationships / General; Music / Ethnomusicology; Music / Religious / General; Music / Religious / Jewish; Religion / Judaism / General; Religion / Judaism / Rituals & Practice; Social Science / Jewish Studies