Explorer's Journal from Brooklyn: Noah Schall - Installment One
Noah Schall, a 92-year-old elder cantorial pedagogue, has made significant contributions to Jewish music and culture. Born in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in 1929, Schall learned music from the son of Seidel Rovner, a renowned cantor.
Throughout his career, Schall has produced cantorial records, published anthologies of nusakh hatefillah, and transcribed classic recorded cantorial recitatives. He has also served as an instructor in the cantorial training programs of the Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox seminaries.
Schall's unique approach to teaching nusakh, the melodic patterns of Jewish liturgical music, has attracted singers who favor the sound of classic cantorial records. His pedagogy, which started at the age of 16, initially involved helping fledgling cantors make sense of musical scores and translating the written notes into musical practices consistent with conventions of cantorial vocal performance.
In his work, Schall highlighted the importance of the subtonic in Jewish music and interpreted melodic movements as building blocks of a distinctive Jewish music theoretical structure. He sang for the beginning of the koralishe nusakh for mariv, a less frequently heard form of nusakh today, which sounded similar to the "Lithuanian" style but used a major third instead of the familiar minor modality.
Schall developed a close working relationship with Moshe Genchoff, one of the last "star" Eastern European-born cantors working in the United States. He also helped Jacob Konigsberg, Jeremiah Lockwood's grandfather, prepare for his broadcasts on WEVD.
Schall's collection of century-old manuscripts, a treasure trove of cantorial art music, is a burden of bulky ephemera, taking up space in cramped living spaces and waiting to be thrown out by families when elder cantors pass away. The value of this collection is ambiguous due to the present reduced interest in cantorial art music and the absence of a legitimizing structure of authority.
Despite the lack of detailed information about other notable cantors or composers associated with Schall or their specific contributions, his personal association with "golden age" cantors and his unique talents as a creative artist in the genre make his approach to teaching nusakh especially attractive to those interested in preserving and understanding the rich history of Jewish liturgical music.
For comprehensive information beyond what has been found, further specialized sources such as cantorial archives, Jewish music journals, or dedicated biographies would be required. The "Chassidic" variants of nusakh are commonly heard in Brooklyn and other areas with Chassidic populations, and Gershon Ephros (1890-1978) and Adolf Katchko (1888-1958) are the cantorial anthologists whose works are used as pedagogical materials in the cantorial training programs of the Conservative and Reform seminaries.
[1] TikTok post: @jewishmusicarchive
Engaging in education-and-self-development, Noah Schall's students learn various aspects of Jewish music, including the unique approach of nusakh taught by the 92-year-old elder cantorial pedagogue. The entertainment value in understanding and preserving traditional cantorial music, with its rich history and less frequently heard forms like the "Lithuanian" style, adds an element of music learning that sets Noah Schall apart.
