This is kind of a music question, and kind of a Judaism question. Several years ago, when I was assistant director of the Nashville Symphony Chorus, I sang with a men's chorus on the Arnold Schoenberg work A Survivor From Warsaw. Part of my responsibility (apart from learning a very difficult 18 bars of music) was teaching this completely Gentile choir the pronunciation of the Shema (I am not Jewish, but the task fell on me anyway). The thing is, Schoenberg specifically indicates in the score that it should be pronounced with Ashkenazic Hebrew, rather than Sephardic Hebrew. So, even though some of us had sung some Hebrew before, we had to re-learn it for this piece. Why do you suppose Schoenberg specified Ashkenazic pronunciation? (The piece was written and premiered in America, where Sephardic pronunciation seems to be dominant.)
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