Golden Ages

Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era

Jeremiah Lockwood

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2024
• ISBN:
  9780520396449
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Estudios judíos

A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press's Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. Golden Ages is an ethnographic study of young singers in the contemporary Brooklyn Hasidic community who base their aesthetic explorations of the culturally intimate space of prayer on the gramophone-era cantorial golden age. Jeremiah Lockwood proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice that calls upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to disrupt the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their conservative community, defying institutional authority and pushing at normative boundaries of sacred and secular. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, golden age cantorial music offers aspiring Hasidic singers a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority are aligned.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Subvention
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: “I didn’t know what I was craving until I found it”
• 1. Animating the Archive: Old Records and Young Singers
• Interlude A. The Lemmer Brothers: Music and Genre in Orthodox New York Life
• 2. Learning Nusakh: Cultivating Skill and Ideology in the Cantorial Training Studio
• 3. Cantors at the Pulpit: The Limits of Revivalist Aesthetics
• Interlude B. Fragments of Continuity: Two Case Studies of Fathers and Sons in the Changing Landscape of American Orthodox Jewish Liturgy
• 4. Concert, Internet, and Kumzits: Stages of Sacred Listening
• Interlude C. Producing the Revival: Making Golden Ages the Album
• Conclusion: Cantors and Their Ghosts
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography