Chazzanut, The Art Of Cantorial Prayer

A cantor, hazzan in Hebrew, leads a synagogue congregation in the sung and chanted portions of Jewish liturgy, a role requiring not only a trained singing voice but deep familiarity with nusach, the traditional musical modes and melodic formulas associated with specific prayers, holidays and even times of day, which vary between Ashkenazi, Sephardi and other regional Jewish liturgical traditions; a skilled cantor is expected to select and often improvise within these traditional modes rather than simply perform a fixed, unchanging melody, a demanding combination of musicianship and textual and liturgical scholarship.

Chazzanut developed into a highly regarded and technically virtuosic art form particularly in nineteenth and early twentieth century Eastern European Jewish communities, producing renowned cantors whose recordings and performances reached audiences well beyond the synagogue itself, a golden age of cantorial art considerably diminished by the Holocaust's destruction of the Eastern European Jewish communities that had sustained it and by the mid-twentieth-century decline in prestige of the full-time professional cantorate relative to congregational rabbis in much of American Jewish life, though cantorial schools within the Reform, Conservative and Orthodox movements continue to train and ordain cantors, including, since the late twentieth century, women in the non-Orthodox movements.