Tefillah / Art Beit Midrash Music

Bind me—I still can sing—
Banish—my mandolin
Strikes true within—
Slay—and my Soul shall rise
Chanting to Paradise—
Still thine.
Emily Dickinson

Which instrument in the Psalm "speaks" to you the most? Which do you hear in your mind? Any? Which is best to praise God with? Express wonder? Gratitude?
Is the breath an instrument? Beyond singing, how does it "make music?"

During a walk in the summer of 1922, the conversation turns to music — a subject the seventeen-year-old Gustav wished passionately to study, but his father forbade the pursuit. Kafka tells his young companion:
Music is the sound of the soul, the direct voice of the subjective world.
In a subsequent conversation, when Gustav shares with his mentor a short story he has written titled The Music of Silence, Kafka elaborates on how music casts its spell on the soul:
Everything that lives is in flux. Everything that lives emits sound. But we only perceive a part of it. We do not hear the circulation of the blood, the growth and decay of our bodily tissue, the sound of our chemical processes. But our delicate organic cells, the fibres of brain and nerves and skin are impregnated with these inaudible sounds. They vibrate in response to their environment. This is the foundation of the power of music. We can set free these profound emotional vibrations.
How does singing with a minyan help us harness the power of music?
What visual images do you get from reading this Kafka passage and considering the line from Psalm 150: "Every breath, every soul, shall praise Yah!"?

What is your interpretation of "a new song?"
Is there a part of the prayer service that you would like to see set to music?
What does that tune look like visually to you?

The redeemed people were the ones able to sing a new song because they were filled with gratitude. The song was in unison as they used a tune familiar to everyone. The leaders who wrote the song chanted line by line and the entire people repeated each line after them.

As a generative art form, constantly modified by interactions between musicians and musical ideas, music has a history and genealogy extending far beyond any single note, phrase, pattern, or tune. As a product of human activity and an element of human culture, music is “hitched” to everything that constitutes life itself—physically, intellectually, and spiritually.
Jonathan Friedmann, "Exploring Music in the Human Experience"

We meet our friend in a melody as in a glance of the eye, far beyond where words have strength to climb; we explain by the corresponding tone in an instrument that trait in our admired picture, for which no sufficiently subtle analogy had yet been found. Botany had never touched our true knowledge of our favourite flower, but a symphony displays the same attitude and hues; the philosophic historian had failed to explain the motive of our favourite hero, but every bugle calls and every trumpet proclaims him… Music, by the ready medium, the stimulus and the upbearing elasticity it offers for the inspirations of thought, alone seems to present a living form rather than a dead monument to the desires of Genius.
Margaret Fuller, Lives of the Great Composers