Ernest Bloch

The Swiss-American composer whose Baal Shem: Three Pictures of Hassidic Life (1923) put a movement titled Nigun into the violin repertoire, where it has stayed.

⭐⭐ THE TEST CASE FOR THE NODE ABOVE, AND HE ANSWERED IT HIMSELF. Bloch insisted his Jewish works were not ethnographic — not collected melodies, not Hasidic practice, but something he claimed to find in himself and set down. So Nigun is a concert piece named after a devotional technique by a man outside the community that practised it. ⭐ And it is the most-played "Jewish" violin work in the world, which means that for a great many listeners the word niggun now means a virtuoso solo in a hall where nobody else is singing — the exact inverse of the practice in Section II. That inversion is the node.