Five minutes before the wedding of Sheri and Michael Berg this past July at Congregation Shalom, Cantor Karen Berman went up to them and croaked, “I can’t sing.” She had laryngitis.
“We missed her,” said Sheri in a recent telephone interview. “But what can you do?”
Nevertheless, the musical accompaniment for her wedding, which they had planned with Berman and was provided by flutist Rick Aaron with a pianist, still went very well and “definitely made it a more sacred ceremony,” said Sheri. “Everyone said how beautiful it was.”
This mishap made this wedding distinctive; but the musical choices apparently made it more typical of what is being done at increasingly more Jewish weddings, according to local cantors.
Sheri and Michael knew they wanted “a separation between the ceremony music and the reception music,” and that they wanted Jewish music for the ceremony. Berman obliged by bringing together an assortment of Yiddish, Israeli and “older pieces.”
Some years ago, a cantor no longer in town told this writer that he had encountered couples who insisted on having the wedding marches by anti-Semitic German composer Richard Wagner (known popularly as “Here Comes the Bride”) or by Jewish convert to Christianity Felix Mendelssohn. They would say things like “My parents got married to ‘Here Comes the Bride,’ and so will we.”
Today this doesn’t seem to happen. “I can’t remember the last time a bride and groom requested Wagner or Mendelssohn,” said Cantor Jerome Berkowitz, who has served Beth El Ner Tamid Synagogue for eight years. “It’s been very rare in Milwaukee. That’s not because I steer them away; it just hasn’t come up.”
In fact, according to Berman, couples aren’t asking for pop songs or Broadway show tunes to be part of wedding ceremonies as much as they did when Berman first began serving Shalom in 1987.
Instead, more couples are asking for Jewish music to accompany their wedding ceremonies — for the processionals, recessionals, sometimes even to accompany a reading of the ketubah or the saying of the Seven Blessings.
And cantors, not surprisingly, love to oblige — in fact, this is “one of the pleasures of the job” to Berman — providing an ever widening range of items: Yiddish songs, klezmer instrumental pieces, Israeli and Sephardi folk songs, works by such modern composers as Debbie Friedman, Shlomo Carlebach and Naomi Shemer.
Preferences and quirks
All four of the Milwaukee area’s full-time synagogue cantors are willing to meet with couples and help them choose music for the wedding service. They all say they are prepared to be flexible if a couple has specific choices in mind and to guide those who don’t.
“I like to see what they know,” said Cantor David M. Barash, who joined the staff of Congregation Emanu-El B’ne Jeshurun last summer. “Some of the couples meet at camp or have gone to Jewish camps” and like to have in the wedding songs they learned there.
“My own approach is that a wedding is such a personal matter that the first thing I ask [a couple] is if they have any ideas or preferences, likes, dislikes, or a particular music in mind,” said Berkowitz. “I actually find they often don’t.”
Naturally, cantors have their own preferences. When Cantor Ruth Berman Harris, who joined the staff of Congregation Sinai last summer, meets with a couple, “I try to show them the kinds of music that I feel will be uplifting and sensitive or sensible or spiritual for the wedding. Sometimes I tell them this would be nicer than that from my perspective. In general, when I show them what I like to do, they accept.”
Some cantors, if the couple approves, will bring very individual items or approaches to the wedding. Barash, for example, once saw a wedding in which the cantor came down the aisle ahead of the wedding party singing what he thought was a beautiful Ladino (Jewish Spanish) folk song, and he picked up the practice and the song.
Only occasionally does a cantor have to guide people away from something totally inappropriate. Berman said she gets an occasional request for J. S. Bach’s “Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring,” usually from a couple who doesn’t know or understand the work’s title. (“Jesu” is another way of saying Jesus.)
Some couples will deliberately try to do something unusual with the wedding music. For example, Eron and Elaine Laber, who got married last September, planned their wedding at Sinai before Harris joined the staff.
While Harris did sing a setting of “Dodi Li” (“My Beloved is Mine,” based on a verse from the Bible’s Song of Songs) during the ceremony, most of the accompanying music was provided by a string quartet — and because Eron is a professional photographer (Front Room Photography) who has shot numerous weddings, he wanted to avoid the musical selections he had heard often at others.
Moreover, because Elaine is a convert to Judaism and they feel “spiritual but not necessarily religious,” they “wanted a very inclusive ceremony” not as heavily ethnic as some Jewish weddings.
Another couple that Cantor Berman recalled sang to one another during the ceremony. “They were both musicians and singers, so it made perfect sense,” said Berman.
As much as music can add to the ceremony, however, the cantors emphasized that “We’re there for the couple,” said Berman. “Sometimes people think a wedding is like a show, but it is the exact opposite.”
Indeed, Harris said that providing moral support can be as important and providing musical accompaniment.
“The only thing I do if I have a chance to talk to the couple before [the ceremony] is to let them know I will be at the end of the aisle, and they can look at me while they walk,” she said. “Some couples are really nervous and need some help.”
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