HEBREW UNION COLLEGE - JEWISH
INSTITUTE OF RELIGION
The Academic, Spiritual and Professional Development Center
for Reform Judaism
HUC-JIR CELEBRATES THE JUBILEE ANNIVERSARY OF
THE SCHOOL OF SACRED MUSIC
Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman, President of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute
of Religion, has inaugurated the jubilee celebration of the 50th anniversary of
the founding of the HUC-JIR's School of Sacred Music (SSM). Founded in 1948 in
New York by Hebrew Union College, the SSM was created at a time when the Holocaust
threatened to sever the continuity of the Jewish people's cultural heritage. The
SSM dedicated itself as a guarantor that the musical traditions of generations
past would survive and be enhanced by the creativity of new generations. With
a mission to teach, preserve and promote Jewish liturgical music and to train
cantors for the Reform Movement and the Jewish People, the SSM gathered a distinguished
faculty, began publishing out-of-print classics, and established an academic and
cultural center for Jewish music with the Chazzan, the Cantor, at its center.
Since its founding, the SSM has trained 299 cantors who serve congregations
throughout North America. In 1975, HUC-JIR invested Barbara Ostfeld
Horowitz as the first woman cantor in history; a total of 121 women have
been invested as cantors to date.
Today, the rigorous four-year program, leading to the degree of Master of Sacred
Music, includes a mandatory first year of study at the College-Institute's Jerusalem
School followed by three years at the New York campus featuring intensive Judaic,
Hebrew, music, musicology, and liturgy studies, vocal and professional skills
training, internships and pastoral care and counseling course and field work,
and performance. Upon investiture as cantors, alumni are eligible for membership
in the American Conference of Cantors, an affiliate of the Union of American
Hebrew Congregations.
The full-year of celebration will include:
- Academic Conference: "Music, Spirit, Scholarship:
The Legacy of Eduard Birnbaum" [November22-23, 1998 in New York] -
the first academic conference ever devoted to research based on, and music
preserved in, HUC-JIR's Eduard
Birnbaum Collection. Preserved at HUC-JIR's Klau Library in Cincinnati,
this collection is acknowledged to be the world's largest (90,000 items) and
most important collection of 18th and 19th century European Jewish music and
archival material and comprises some 60% of all known Jewish music manuscripts
created before 1840. The conference will host visiting musicologists from
throughout the United States and Israel. Musical performances will be presented
by the School of Sacred Music Choir and the Collegium Musicum of New York
University, an early music ensemble.
- Exhibition: A Treasury of Sacred Melodies [September
1998 - January 1999 in New York, then traveling to HUC-JIR's campuses in Cincinnati,
Los Angeles and Jerusalem]: an exhibition of rare vocal scores and
manuscripts, never before shown to the public, from the
Eduard Birnbaum Collection, which will feature music manuscripts for the
Sabbath and Jewish holidays from Germany's vanished Jewish communities displayed
together with photographs, memorabilia, artifacts and text panels illustrating
the cultural and historical context of the music. The influence of secular
and church music on the development of 18th and 19th century Jewish liturgical
music will also be presented.
- Concerts by cantorial alumni
and premiering new compositions by SSM
alumni/ae, and the study of liturgical music preserved by the Birnbaum
Collection performed by SSM students will take place throughout the jubilee year
- Convocation: the inauguration of the Doctor of Music, Honoris Causa, to
distinguished cantorial alumni [Fall 1998].
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