Niggun

The wordlessness of a niggun is the argument, not a shortcut. Hasidic teaching holds that a text fixes what the singer can mean, and that a melody carried on vocables such as bim bam or ay ay ay leaves the intention free to go further than the words would let it. A niggun is therefore not performed and finished. It is repeated, often for a long time, and the repetition is where the work is done, because the melody is meant to move the singer rather than to inform a listener.

Musically the form is modest. Most niggunim are built from two, three or four short sections, each repeated, with the later sections rising in register and intensity before the melody returns to where it began. The materials are ordinary: many of the melodies are recognisably drawn from the surrounding world, from Ukrainian and Polish folk song, from military marches, in one much discussed Chabad case from a Napoleonic march. Hasidic thought does not treat that borrowing as a compromise. The melody is understood to be raised by the use made of it, which is a claim about redemption rather than about musicology.

What distinguishes a niggun from ordinary singing is not its notes but its occasion and its owner. A melody belongs to a court, has a rebbe attached to its origin, and is sung at a particular moment. To sing the wrong court's niggun at a tish would be legible to everyone in the room, in the way that wearing the wrong garment would be, and that legibility is a large part of what the repertory is for.

Hasidism is not one body but a family of courts, and each keeps its own melodies. Chabad is the outlier in how it has handled them. Where most courts carry their repertory by ear and leave it uncatalogued, Chabad began publishing its niggunim in the twentieth century, in the collection assembled under Shmuel Zalmanov from 1948, and treats particular melodies as teaching material with named origins and stated purposes. The result is that Chabad niggunim are the ones most often heard outside Hasidism, and the ones most often assumed to be typical when they are in fact unusually well documented.

Breslov holds the form on a different footing. Its founder taught that joy is an obligation and that melody is one of its instruments, and its repertory is smaller, more concentrated and more closely tied to a handful of texts and phrases than Chabad's. The most widely recognised Breslov chant outside the movement is a short phrase built on its founder's name, which spread through Israeli public life in the late twentieth century in a way none of its adherents planned.

The form has travelled a long way from the courts. Niggunim are sung in non-Orthodox congregations that hold none of the theology behind them, in Israeli popular music, and by professional performers with no Hasidic connection at all. Hasidic communities are not uniformly comfortable with that, but the movement outward has been going on for a century and shows no sign of reversing.