About the niggun

Recently, I've been told about a kind of project some modern Hasidim have to create instrumental version of niggunim loved by their group. (Yeah, it took me some diplomatic second thinking to create this sentence). Mostly, there are Shabbes and Yom Tov songs that were never translated into the 'rational' language of the scores.

Since the idea of the app with music for Shabbes and Yom Tov - I do have my own NCSY Bencher app, promoted by the Orthodox Union, which I do have too and I love the songs - it seems that we are slowly getting used with the mix between the usual things reserved only for the time of rest and the rest of the week. I don't think it is fine and I am curious enough to want to have or listen to them during the week or before Shabbes. 

But when it comes to niggun, the beauty of it is the sound of human voice, the lack of words which is like a deep cry from the human heart to the heavenly courts. There are no gates left closed after that. Nothing compares for me to the beauty of a Karliner niggun, sung by the innocent voices of children. 

The return to music into the synagogues in the 18th century is the work of the Baal Shem Tov, which considered songs another mystical layer of the prayer. The pace of the music can express various feelings and mystical stages, from meditation, to slow reflection and happiness and the recent-times Kabbalists are praising niggunim as an easier way to reach G-d.

Therefore, do we need instrumental versions of niggunim? One of the things I love more about them is how easy is to create improvisations and to develop some themes spontaneously, the power of the individual voice that can lead and change the pace entirely. Like life, sometimes you go on an unbeaten path and reach new symbols and values and reasons of growth. 

And I know that I will rather prefer that other things are becoming more modernised, while the raw beauty of niggunim is left unaltered.