With One Voice: Congregational Singing and the Path to the Union Hymnal

• In Event: American Judaism and the “Unity” Impulse

Abstract

In the final decades of the nineteenth century, the Central Conference of American Rabbis’ publication committee set its sights on creating a national prayer book. The limited number of competent musicians who joined them in their meetings—including G. M. Cohen, Samuel Welsch, William Sparger, and Alois Kaiser—worked to provide the service a soundtrack. Over the first half of the 1890s, these musicians’ efforts would eventually turn a modest proposal for musical accompaniment into a grandiose drama, firmly differentiating rabbis and cantors, pitting New York against the rest of the country, and stoking the tensions of religious authority on the matter of congregational singing. Judah Cohen’s paper analyzes this liturgical politic and the efforts that produced The UNION HYMNAL in 1897, a flawed and controversial manual that nonetheless presented The UNION PRAYER BOOK with a meaningful musical foundation.

Author

• Judah M. Cohen, Indiana University