The Music of Jewish Prayer (and something about my music)

Judit Niran Frigyesi's book, Writing on Water, the Sounds of Jewish Prayer, is about a unique kind of music: the way that traditional Hungarian Jews used to chant their prayers. As she describes it, the chanting is inseparable from the words of the prayers, and the meaning of prayer is conveyed as much by the chant as by the words.
The word "chant," is my own. Figyesi does not use it at all in reference to the prayers she describes. The basic musical foundation is what we would call nusah in modern Hebrew (she renders the word in the Ashkenazic pronunciation of her informants: nisech). Cantors improvise on this foundation and add melodies. The Jewish men whose prayer she studied would never think of praying without this chanting.
They were children in the 1920s and 1930s, and they grew up learning to pray, with melody, as they learned how to talk.
Toward the end of the book, Frigyesi describes the revival of the Hungarian Jewish community after the collapse of Communism, in the mode of Modern Orthodoxy, which is essentially the kind of Judaism I have come to know here in Israel.
It's not the same thing.
But many musical experiences are deeply meaningful and not the same thing. Judit describes the many concerts she went to when she was a high school student and then a student at the music academy, and she also describes the experience of recording Gregorian chants with a chorus of which she was a member.
Neither Judit nor I can make ourselves into the elderly Holocaust survivors she describes, who kept alive the organic Judaism of their childhood. For me, music is something largely separate from my religious observance, though when I attend services I am carried along by the music and join in the singing. This morning I had an unexpected and unfamiliar feeling while I was practicing flute: I suddenly felt as if someone else were playing, and I was both standing outside it and doing it.
This is connected with to what Frigyesi writes about music and prayer.
I wonder whether I will ever recapture that feeling.