All religious belief relies on space and the transformation of space into sacredness. In a broad sense, the term “sacred” indicates something special, set apart, other, which is why religion relies so heavily on creating sacredness. Yet, where do the boundaries of the sacred lie? Is sacred space an ontological given, or is it a social construction? Is it something we experienced, or is it something we perform, or both? Sacred spaces have had great influence on the creation of music through the ages. They inspired composers to create beautiful music to fill beautiful spaces. From Gregorian chants to composers such as Amadeus Mozart, Maurice Duruflé, and John Rutter, men have been central to the creation of sacred music since at least the 9th century. The absence of women’s voices in the creation of music correlates with women’s lack of authority in sacred space. This provides a crucial insight into the ability of music to provide authority to women in a space where their autonomy has been missing.
In thinking about sacred space and music, together with gender I encountered roadblocks that ultimately became important arguments for my thesis. First I needed to find and develop definitions of each term, definitions that were all-encompassing but also focused on the aspect of sacred space, music, and gender, and that would draw them together into my thesis. In previous scholarship that connects gender, music, and sacred space, the authors focus on the interactions of the three concepts by looking at the influence that gender has on music in sacred space, or the impact of sacred space women in the community. After reading through much of the previous scholarship and experiencing the impact of music and the power of the one who wields it in the creation of sacred space, I develop a theory concerning the larger influence of women cantors and other musicians participating in music on the creation of sacred space and the authority of women in those spaces.
In demonstrating how the power of music gives authority to women in a space where their autonomy has been missing, I focus on the authority of women cantors in their creation of sacred space. I begin by establishing the relationship between music and gender to realize the influence of music in providing power to individuals. Then I work through the various conceptions of sacred space to investigate why music maintains a certain control over the creation of sacred space. Finally, I discuss the implications of music and gender on sacred spaces within Judaism in order to solidify the concept of the authority of women cantors in creating sacred space in Reform Judaism.
Music and Gender
During the past decade a great deal of research on women in music has been published by both historical musicologists and ethnomusicologists. Much of the research has been an attempt to redress the imbalance of male-oriented studies. These typically represent the discovery of a woman composer or performer in an era or society previously investigated only in terms of men's music. Ellen Koskoff, Professor Emerita of Ethnomusicology at the Eastman School of Music, has contributed greatly to the scholarship surrounding women in music since the 1980s. While many of her books and articles are helpful sources upon which to draw, her 1989 anthology includes articles that directly discuss women and music in communities, and the power demonstrated by musical experiences of women. Her work, dedicated to the cross-cultural perspectives of women concerning music, provides a unique insight into the impact of women in roles of musical authority. Koskoff’s own contribution to this book explores the social and religious world of an ultra-orthodox Jewish group called Lubavitcher Hasidim, located in Brooklyn. In her article Koskoff analyzes “the role of gender in structuring and maintaining the conceptual framework regarding music performance and spirituality in Lubavitcher society.” While Koskoff is focusing on an orthodox Jewish community rather than a Reform Jewish community, the specific laws surrounding women’s voice that orthodoxy emphasizes are reflected in the role of women, and women’s voices in Judaism at large. Therefore, Koskoff’s conclusions regarding the power of music in connecting with God, and the gender hierarchy created by sacred music can be applied to the role of music in Reform Judaism, and the historical gender hierarchy that gives authority to the creator of music.
Following her introduction to the male dominant musical sphere in Lubavitcher Hasidism Koskoff states that, “since music is associated primarily with the spiritual realm, it would seem that women, in their role as mediator with the outside world, should have little part in its performance.” Koskoff presents how women in this community concerned themselves with their relationship to the world outside of their Jewish community, and to their family and community, much more than their male counterparts. The result of this difference in priority between women and men in the community enforces the exclusion of women’s voice and therefore their connection to the spiritual realm.
While discussing the ways in which women’s voices distract men from God, Koskoff also focuses on the way that converted men gain acceptance through their devoted performance of sacred music and prayer. She goes on to say that women also display a great appreciation for music in creating a connection with the sacred, “most Lubavitcher women share the theoretical position concerning the role of music in Hasidic life . . . they tend to value music performance and see it as the most effective vehicle for achieving [a bond with God].” Women appreciate the importance of music and musical performance in connecting with God, but they do so outside of the synagogue, away from the ears of men. This forces women to create sacred spaces, through their voice, outside of the traditional sacred space of their synagogue, such as houses.
The importance of looking at gender both in and around music lies in the expressiveness of a society's arrangements concerning power and authority. But to do so completely, the entire social complex surrounding the music must be considered: male and female, private and public music, elite and popular music, performers and audience, composers and consumers, and the business and middlemen involved in purveying the music. Most importantly, at the present time, with gender relationships in flux the world over, it is particularly important not to pre-judge and evaluate the activities of another society on the basis of some model of progress which we as presumably "liberated" Western professional researchers have incorporated.
Music and Authority
Serving as the final article in Koskoff’s book, Carol Robertson discusses music and authority, opening with a statement concerning how musical performance can serve as an instrument of power:
There are many ways in which music touches the lives of women in specific cultural settings. My concerns herein are with a broad, comparative view of performance as an instrument of power and gender definition. In the hands of humans music and its adjunct behaviors can either limit or expand the social, ritual, and political access and awareness of women, men, and children.
Robertson fills an important gap in earlier scholarship as she distinguishes between the implications of power in the performance of music versus the authority demonstrated through musical performance. The difference between the two has to do with coercion, the ability to force someone to do, or to refrain from doing, something against his or her will, be it economically, by law, or by social sanction. Authority is the ability to define a role for oneself in society and to fulfill it competently, often joining with others to do it. When a person finds their authority, it is not something that is easily taken away. In this case, authority refers to the role people take up when they make music. While the means and the rewards for making certain kinds of music can be withheld by a group in power, the actual making of music cannot be coerced, nor can it be totally silenced once a person or group takes the authority to produce it.
The exact form a particular music takes is often influenced by power structures, but, short of death, the will to make music cannot be easily extinguished. The substitution of fiddle and mouth music for the banned Highland bagpipes in 18th-century Scotland or the substitution of hand-clapping and body-patting for the drums banned in the southern U.S. slave culture are well-known illustrations of the principle that music will find an outlet despite attempts to ban it. While many authoritative roles are developed through exclusive powers and skills, music’s accessibility innately provides individuals and groups with authority over their environment.
To play, sing, or compose a piece of music is to take personal authority for a certain length of time in creating and presenting a version of one's life. The person assuming the authority will usually draw on the conventions of the surrounding society and even on its power structures and their definitions, limitations, and ways of developing access to resources for presentation. However, other than in cases of certain kinds of religious music, which I will discuss below, such a performance does not in itself represent power, since it probably cannot change people against their will. It is instead one of the most effective ways of expressing some aspect of the way life is for an individual or group. And, as a way to define an aspect of life, others can take their own authority to join and be changed through it. Taking the performance seriously, its sound as well as any text or extra-musical meaning may give insight into the way performers feel about themselves and their position. In addition, the context of the performance and its surroundings, including the non-musical ones, may give further insight into how they fit into society as a whole. Paying particular attention to gender and gender relationships is one important route towards including the totality of the context.
My critique of current research on music and gender is that in its zeal to right old wrongs, such efforts fall prey to bad scholarship and become ethnocentric. We too often substitute the prejudices and wishes of our own cultures for a close, hard look at how things are elsewhere and we fail to take seriously the idea that cultures express in music something true about themselves. The art of perceptive description and analysis without such prejudice is difficult to achieve because it means finding in ourselves true empathy with elements of societies that in their overall gender arrangements seem to differ radically from ours. For example, the deliberate avoidance of singing by the married women of the Greek village described by Susan Auerbach in Koskoff's book has its counterpart, albeit non-musical, in Western culture in the still viable image of the "good married woman" who does not flaunt herself or her independence, though she may well competently carry on a career. In deference to her husband's career, she does not "sing" about hers, but instead saves her public utterances to those connected with her family role, just as the "singing" of the Greek women after marriage is confined to ritual laments for the family-related activities of weddings and funerals rather than the freer songs of their youth. In order not to inappropriately impose our own vision, we must extend these structures outward from the actual sound of music until we can see the relationships clearly, not only between genders, but also between music and non-music. This approach leads away from both ethnocentrism and what I will call "musico-centrism," for lack of a better term. That is, despite our continued focus on music, we must remain conscious of the non-musical contexts, especially of gender.
Sacred Space
Over the past decades, scholars from across the humanities and the social sciences have approached sacred space in different ways: as a well-defined space set in opposition to the secular (profane); as a contested domain continuously articulated and rearticulated through performance; as a repository of powerful symbols and meanings; as a dynamic assemblage of materials, sounds, and human emotions. While the concept of the sacred has been often extended to non-religious spaces and rituals, especially in the context of memorialization and national identity making, for the purposes of this paper I am limiting the scope of space to sacred space, and then applying the discussion of gender and music to this view of sacred space.
Until about two decades ago, sacred space was generally conceptualized as a well-defined “ontological given,” that is, as a self-bounded space qualitatively different from its surroundings; as an entity territorially fixed around an “axis mundi” and articulated through a trans-cultural geometry of boundaries, pathways and thresholds . The sacred space of a church, of a mosque, of a temple, or of a graveyard, for example, was understood as limited and defined by their walls, which set it apart from the rest of the world—both physically and symbolically. In the 1990s anthropologists influenced by post-structuralism started to challenge this vision and theorize sacred space as a point of convergence (or friction) between competing narratives and social practices enacted by different groups of people. In other words, the sacred space of a shrine was no longer defined by its physical structure per se, but came into being through its users and the (often conflicting) meanings ascribed to it. Scholars were thus called to shift their attention from the “poetics” to the “politics” of religion and the sacred.
As powerful cultural symbols and oft-contested landmarks in the urban landscape, churches, and other “formal” sites of worship provided the new cultural geographers of the 1990s with obvious, if long overlooked, objects for critical analysis. As with monuments and memorials, these sites functioned as lenses through which geographers could interrogate the politics of landscape, identity and memory, especially in contexts of diaspora and territorial conflict. Sacred spaces and religion start to feature as a subfield long marginalized by mainstream human geography, the geography of religions traditionally focused on distribution and diffusion patterns at global and regional scales. In other words, examining religious geography through historical patterns of diffusion is seen by new cultural geographers as lacking critical insight and being “socially irrelevant.” Conversely, religious experience and sacred space were largely deemed the pertain of humanistic geographers and phenomenologists criticized by new cultural geographers for similar reasons.
Among the first geographers who brought the geography of religion in line with the new cultural geography of the 1990s, and put the sacred back on their map, was Lily Kong. In investigating constraints on the construction of religious buildings in Singapore, imposed because of religious state policies, Kong moved from a descriptive approach to a critical approach towards religion and its spatial manifestations. Landscape was not a simple collection of material forms, but of cultural symbols, amidst which religious buildings held special power. Giving voice to different religious groups and minorities, Kong aimed at bridging “the religious” and “the sociopolitical,” two realms which, she claimed, had been separated by scholars for too long a time. While the previous scholarly focus was on spaces of “formal” religious belief and their symbolic power, more recent scholarship has come to recognize religion and spirituality as spatially and temporally unbound and as not necessarily practiced only in officially designated spaces (or at allocated times). Instead, as Kong showed, “there are many ways in which everyday spaces can be implicated in religious meaning-making, legitimating, maintaining and enhancing, but also challenging religious life, beliefs, practices and identities.” Over the past decade or so, the study of sacred space has extended to what the Singaporean geographer termed “the unofficial sacred.”
The more-than-representational aspects of sacred space connect to the unconstructed aspect of music creating space. These include the spiritual, the emotional, and the therapeutic aspects of space and music. Research into how the role of personal experience in the production and perpetuation of sacred spaces challenges both the structuralist narratives and the sociological determinisms of traditional approaches. Focus is thus recast from the contested politics of religion to the intimate poetics of spirituality. Sacred space is conceptualized not so much as an empty vessel filled with conflicting narratives and meanings, but as a complex texture of materials and affects holding a transformative potential on their users. Some of these ideas find distant echoes in Wilbert Gesler’s early work on the “therapeutic landscape.” Gesler intended the “therapeutic landscape” in a holistic sense, as encompassing natural and built environments, social conditions and human experience. These, he argued, combined to produce an atmosphere which was conducive to healing. While the concept of “therapeutic landscape” can be, and has been, applied to various non-religious contexts, Gesler here chose to focus his analysis on the ancient temple of Aesculapius in Epidaurus (Greece). The sacred ground of the temple was experienced by its users as a clearly demarcated entity, or in other words, as “sacred space” in the ontological Eliadean sense. Yet, Gesler argued, its therapeutic qualities appeared closely interrelated with the surrounding natural landscape, its aesthetics and its complex symbologies.
While maintaining a focus on transformative experience, sacred space can be understood first of all as an affective space constructed and experienced through embodied performance. Finlayson considers the emotional experiences of being in two very different sites of worship: a United Methodist Church and a branch of the Taoist Tai Chi Society located in a former residential home in Florida surrounded by natural landscaping. Finlayson extends her analysis from embodied performance to the specificities of the sites and their immediate surroundings. Sacred space is explored via the materialities through which experiences are shaped and the emotional responses they engender. Overall, not only does this suggest an increasing importance in considering religion and its symbolic, material and social dimensions, but it also shows a progressive shift in the understanding of sacred space.
I suggest that we need to move from sacred space as a secure ontological given towards a plethora of approaches and research that highlights its contested, emotional, relational, and fluid dimensions. Far from being the exclusive domain of geographers, the study of sacred space and religion continues to intersect with everyday habits and behaviors, with environmental belief, attitudes, and practice, with social mobility, hybridity and identity, with the relations between private and public space, with geopolitics and territorial imaginations. At a time of increased global mobility and multicultural interaction, these intersections are perhaps relevant as never before.
Music and Judaism
In the middle of the desert, for the first time since their departure from Egypt, the Israelites do something together. They sing. “Then sang Moses and the children of Israel.” Rashi, explaining the view of Rabbi Nehemiah in the Talmud, argues that they spontaneously sang the song together, which means that the holy spirit rested on them and miraculously the same words came into their minds at the same time. In recollection of that moment, tradition has named the week in which this Torah portion is read in the annual cycle, Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song. This already tells us something of the place of song in Judaism.
There is an inner connection between music and the spirit. When language aspires to the transcendent, and the soul longs to break free of the gravitational pull of the earth, it modulates into song. Music, said Arnold Bennett, is “a language which the soul alone understands but which the soul can never translate.” Words are the language of the mind. Music is the language of the soul. When we seek to express or evoke emotion, we turn to melody. Deborah sang after Israel’s victory over the forces of Sisera. Hannah sang when she had a child. When Saul was depressed, David would play for him and his spirit would be restored. David himself was known as the “sweet singer of Israel.” Elisha called for a harpist to play so that the prophetic spirit could rest upon him. The Levites sang in the Temple. Every day, in Judaism, Jews preface their morning prayers with the “Verses of Song” culminating in the magnificent crescendo, Psalm 150, in which instruments and the human voice combine to sing God’s praises. Psalm 19 says, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of His hands . . . There is no speech, there are no words, where their voice is not heard. Their music carries throughout the earth, their words to the end of the world.” Beneath the silence, audible only to the inner ear, creation sings to its Creator.
There are different melodies for different texts. There is one kind of cantillation for Torah, another for the haftarah from the prophetic books, and yet another for Ketuvim (the Writings), especially the five megillot (the small books read on holidays such as Esther, and Song of Songs). There is a particular chant for studying the texts of the written Torah, for studying Mishnah and Gemara. So by music alone we can tell what kind of day it is and what kind of text is being used. There is a map of holy words, and it is written in melodies and songs. Music has extraordinary power to evoke emotion. The Kol Nidrei prayer with which Yom Kippur begins is not really a prayer at all. It is a dry legal formula for the annulment of vows. There can be little doubt that its ancient, haunting melody has given it its hold on the Jewish imagination. It is hard to hear those notes and not feel that you are in the presence of God on the Day of Judgment, standing in the company of Jews of all places and times as they pleaded with heaven for forgiveness. It is the holy of holies of the Jewish soul.
Beethoven wrote over the manuscript of the third movement of his A Minor Quartet the words Neue Kraft fühlend, “Feeling new strength.” That is what you sense in those hospital wards. You understand what King David meant when he sang to God the words: “You turned my grief into dance; you removed my sackcloth and clothed me with joy, that my heart may sing to You and not be silent.” You feel the strength of the human spirit no terror can destroy. Faith is more like music than like science. Science analyzes; music integrates. And, as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God’s song. Faith teaches people to hear the music beneath the noise, making music a signal of transcendence. The philosopher and musician Roger Scruton writes that it is “an encounter with the pure subject, released from the world of objects, and moving in obedience to the laws of freedom alone.” He quotes Rilke: “Words still go softly out towards the unsayable / And music, always new, from palpitating stones / builds in useless space its godly home.” The history of the Jewish spirit is written in its songs. The words do not change, but each generation needs its own melodies. Given the historical significance of music in Judaism, it is important to explore the current use of music in American Reform Judaism.
In the above exploration of gender, authority, and music as they relate to each other, I have explored the impact of music in Judaism and expressed the authority derived from creating music. The ephemeral nature of music, especially in relation to gender and space, requires experiential evidence in order to be described concretely. Thus, for this thesis, in addition to using scholarship to discuss and support the power of music in creating space, I conducted interviews with women cantors of Reform Synagogues in the United States. Having argued for theoretical authority, I now turn to real authority, whether wielded or lacking. Through these interviews I access women’s experiences in order to argue for their importance in creating sacred space.