Cantorial music developed its own elaborate art over the medieval and early modern period, particularly among Ashkenazi communities in Eastern Europe, where improvised prayer modes and coloratura vocal display around a fixed liturgical text produced a repertoire and a virtuoso performance tradition distinct from the plainer styles other communities preferred. The late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are often called the golden age of the cantorate, when star hazzans toured and recorded, some achieving fame among Jewish audiences comparable to opera singers, before the Holocaust destroyed the communities and institutions, particularly across Eastern Europe, that had sustained the tradition at its height.
The office has since been formalised through dedicated cantorial schools and professional associations that train and certify hazzans for congregational service, and Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist Judaism now ordain women as cantors, a change Orthodox congregations, in keeping with their broader restriction on women's public liturgical leadership, have not adopted.
Formal cantorial ordination today runs through dedicated programmes, including the H. L. Miller Cantorial School at the Jewish Theological Seminary for the Conservative movement and the School of Sacred Music at Hebrew Union College for Reform, combining vocal and liturgical training with academic study over several years before conferring the title hazzan, a credentialing structure giving the modern cantorate an institutional shape closer to the rabbinate than the informally trained cantors of earlier centuries, who typically apprenticed under a working hazzan rather than attending a seminary.