Sylvan Sholom Kalib (July 24, 1929 – January 15, 2025) was an American music theorist, musicologist, cantor, conductor, pedagogue and composer.

His father was a furniture finisher by trade who acquired notable musical skill during his youth in Russia through exposure to his brother's cantorial training.

The following year, at age fourteen, he was appointed choir leader for Cantor Abraham Kipper, officiary of Jewish High Holidays at the Chicago Rumanian Synagogue, Shaarei Shamayim.

[3] Kalib gradually acquired a national reputation for exceptionally fine musical arrangements and accompaniments and for his skill in transcribing Ashkenazic cantorial chant as evidenced in the Greenberg and Lind volumes.

[5] In 1966, Kalib began the Ph.D. in music theory at Northwestern University, where he introduced Schenkerian analysis to the faculty (and was, incidentally, classmate to Joseph Schwantner, Thom David Mason and Harold Wiesner).

A fortuitous academic consequence of Kalib's mastery was the exceptional commitment to in-depth training in fundamental areas of music theory within the overall comprehensive approach to the subject at Eastern Michigan University during his tenure.

[9] Six selections from the latter work were recorded by the Vienna Boys’ Choir in 2001 as part of the Milken Archive of American Jewish Music featuring the preeminent cantor of the Great Synagogue in Jerusalem, Naftali Hershtik.

While maintaining cantorial posts in Detroit and Flint during his professorial career, and throughout formal sabbaticals, Kalib undertook musicological research in major Jewish communities in North America and Israel, recording and archiving fading historic cantorial tradition and repertoire in one-hundred-and-twenty taped interviews with forty Eastern European professional and lay cantors.

The choir produced an Inaugural Season compact disc—the first in a set of seventy-five planned recordings—but archival recording ceased in 2007 due to insufficient funds and musical resources.