| Summary: | "Golden Ages: Hasidic Singers and Cantorial Revival in the Digital Era is an ethnographic study of young singers in the Brooklyn Hasidic community who look to the gramophone-era cantorial golden age for the stylistic basis of their own aesthetic explorations. The book proposes a view of their work as a nonconforming social practice within the conservative contemporary Hasidic community. Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the sounds and structures of Jewish sacred musical heritage to stage a disruption in the aesthetics and power hierarchies of their community and the aesthetics of prayer in contemporary American Jewish synagogue life outside the Hasidic world. Beyond its role as a desirable art form, "golden age" cantorial music offers a model for aspiring Hasidic singers of a form of Jewish cultural productivity in which artistic excellence, maverick outsider status, and sacred authority were aligned. The musical lives of contemporary cantorial revivalists suggest new ways of thinking about the meaning of the work of gramophone-era cantors. Hasidic cantorial revivalists call upon the cantors of the golden age as a precedent for musical and social practices that defy institutional authority and push at normative boundaries of sacred and secular by foregrounding artist's voices in the culturally intimate space of prayer"--
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