By Matt Austerklein
The Jewish Music Research Centre mourns the loss of Cantor Sylvan Sholom Kalib (July 24, 1929 - January 15, 2025), a prominent scholar of Western music theory who was also a leading composer, arranger, and documenter of the East European Synagogue Tradition in the United States.
The son of Ukranian-Jewish immigrants, Sholom Kalib was a mainstay of Jewish music in mid-twentieth century Chicago, serving as a well-regarded hazzan, choirmaster, and cantorial pedagogue. There he also began his life’s work notating the great heritage of Eastern European cantorial tradition, transcribing and publishing the cantorial compositions of his teachers Cantors Joshua Lind and Todros Greenberg. Simultaneously, he began his lifelong engagement with Western music theory, completing a doctorate at Northwestern University on Heinrich Schenker which would become an early pillar of English-language scholarship on Schenkerian analysis. In addition to writing many celebrated compositions and arrangements of cantorial music, Kalib served as Professor of Music Theory at Eastern Michigan University from 1969-1999, and also as cantor of Congregation Beth Israel in Flint, Michigan from 1977-2000.
Following his retirement from full-time academia, Kalib began work on his monumental volume, The Musical Tradition of The Eastern European Synagogue, conceived as a five-volume, twenty-book treatise on Eastern European Ashkenazic liturgical music, repertoire, and varying traditions. Three volumes made it to print: Vol. 1: History and Definition (2002), Vol. 2: The Weekday Services (2005), and Vol. 3: The Sabbath Services in two parts – Friday Evening (2017) and The Sabbath Day (2023). These weighty tomes represent the most ambitious anthology of comparative Ashkenazic chant to be attempted in modern scholarship, calling out to a new generation of cantors scholars to dive deep into their contents and interpret them anew. As the books also largely comprise notations of Kalib’s field work with over one hundred traditional Ashkenazic cantors and prayer leaders, they further represent both the triumphs and the difficulties of capturing a diverse, non-Western oral tradition in the confines of Western notation.
Additional bibliography
A detailed and updated biography of Sholol Kalib with links to additional materials is accessible via Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvan_Kalib
Additional full biography see at the Milken archive of Jewish Music website.
For a comprehensive interview by Charlie Bernhaut with Sholom Kalib see:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EoP2GA0IvgQ
Music arranged and composed by Sholom Kalib can be heard in the following links:
Kol Nidrei: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bORp5E6Ef_k
(*The photo was taken from the Milken archive of Jewish Music website)
