Lauren Phillips, Congregation Sinai’s new cantor, is familiar with Bayside and Port Washington — the ones in New York, that is.
Except for her time studying in Boston and Israel, Phillips has spent most of her life in New York, and she is just beginning to adjust to life in Wisconsin, after starting her new job here at the beginning of July. On July 11, she sat for an interview with freelance writer Susan Ellman for The Chronicle. Selected and edited excerpts of that conversation follow:
WJC: Can you tell me something about yourself and how you decided to become a cantor?
CLP: I was almost a Hebrew school dropout. I was active in other activities, but Temple Israel had a rule that we had to go to Hebrew high school until bat mitzvah… I ended up loving it and staying, getting involved, reading Torah. Looking back on it, I had an excellent Jewish education.
I chose Tufts University, majoring in music, with a minor in communications. Then I ended up at the Boston Conservatory, where I got a master’s degree in vocal performance. Unlike Tufts, which had a very strong and close-knit Jewish community, Iwas the only Jew in my class.
There was this “moment of revelation” at the end of my first semester where I sang in the chorus of Beethoven’s Mass in C in a beautiful church in downtown Boston, on the first night of Chanukah. And I’m standing up there singing and … I thought, “I bet nobody in this choir knows that tonight is the first night of Chanukah.” That’s when I decided to make it my mission to explore as much Jewish music as possible.
After I finished that degree, every opera singer needs a good day job, and I landed one at the 92nd Street Y as a publicist. I loved that job, but as I was writing about all these cool Jewish programs that were going on, I realized that I wanted to be the one making these programs and not just writing about what other people are doing.
The real kicker for me was that one of the beats that I had was food events, and come Passover time, … here I was writing about Passover for a non-Jewish audience, and I decided it was time to combine everything.
But my heart wasn’t in it until I realized that my favorite part of the job was this. So I made the leap and left the job that I really liked, and I’m really glad that I did it.
WJC: What kind of music were you thinking of doing before you decided to become a cantor?
CLP: My first love was Broadway. In fact, the first play I ever saw was “Fiddler on the Roof,” so it was funny even then how Judaism was intertwined with that.
I sang with the opera ensemble at Tufts. I studied a little opera in high school with my voice teacher whose husband was also a cantor, so I had that Jewish connection there without even trying. She exposed me to opera, and at first I resisted it, but in college I fell in love with it. So that was the path I was on when I decided to study voice.
WJC: So what was cantorial school [at the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion] like?
CLP: It was a five-year program, with the first in Israel and a student internship when I came back… I had monthly pulpit in Port Washington, N.Y. I did the b’nai mitzvah services.
Then I wanted something more intense, to understand what it’s like to be part of a congregation. So I went to student placement again the beginning of my third year and I ended up staying at this Union Temple in Brooklyn for three years until I finished cantorial school.
WJC: Who are your musical influences, and what would you like to accomplish at Congregation Sinai?
LP: I like to think of my musical style as very authentic. What I struggled with in opera is that the sound is very cultivated. One of my favorite singers is Audra McDonald. She makes everything sound real, and it really sounds from the heart.
To be a cantor these days you need the stamina to sing a piece like the Janowski “Avinu Malkenu” because that’s an expectation. You don’t want to bombard people with really loud, jarring screechy high notes. You have to be able to have a folk style, to be able to sing with kids and have them sing along. Even though my roots are classical and my passion is for musical theater, I bring both worlds into my cantorate, combining the beauty and the reality and the authenticity.
After going through the job placement process, Sinai was the best fit for me of the congregations that were out there. Such a warm and welcoming community. They made me feel that this was something I can do, helped introduce me to people and really make myself feel at home here. That was a big selling point as well.
I’m hoping to interact with all the constituents in this congregation from the b’nai mitzvah students to adult education to the religious school to those people who have been members for longer than I’ve been alive. I really like that Sinai has a demographic that’s such a broad spectrum of ages and people and interests.
I want to really develop relationships with people, to help them on their Jewish journey and be a part of their lifecycle events and milestones, whether they be happy or sad and to just be a presence for them.
WJC: It’s probably too early to ask you about original music…
LP:I do a little composing, not a lot, but I did do a setting of “Sim Shalom.” … I struggled to find a “Sim Shalom” melody that really captured the essence of peace… My goal was to capture the essence of peace — or at least my take on peace — to have it easily learned by the congregation and to incorporate the entire text of the prayer and still make the refrain excerptible on its own so people can sing the refrain or they can sing the entire text.
Milwaukeean Susan Ellman, MLIS, has taught history and English composition at the high school level and is a freelance writer at work on a historical novel.
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