Maybe you’ve heard of this term before … and maybe not.

Here’s what I found about this phenomenon called “musical chills” in a paper written by Emily Nusbaum and Paul Silva.

Have you ever had the experience of listening to a favourite piece of music and suddenly you get a little spikey feeling running down your spine?  How about goose bumps on the skin? Maybe a tingling sensation at the back of your neck? All these unique emotive reactions to music fall under the definition of ‘musical chills’, also termed frisson, thrills and shivers (and apparently, and intriguingly, ‘skin orgasms’!)

Not everyone gets this sensation and some people get it very frequently. It is an extremely intriguing emotional response to music that is almost entirely unique to each individual – both in terms of the sensation itself and the music that triggers it.

Frisson is what happened to me today when I attended Evensong at the Three Choirs Festival in Worcester. The Three Cathedral Choirs of Gloucester, Worcester and Hereford combined to sing one of my favorite settings of the Magnificat and Nunc Dimittis, the Collegium Regale of Herbert Howells. When all those trebles soared to their high notes, I got chills … also called goosebumps, or “chicken skin” as they say in Hawaii.

Just immediately before Evensong, we attended an amazing concert by the Armonico Consort, called “The Forgotten Scarlatti,” referring to Francesco Scarlatti, not as well-known as Alessandro and Domenico, his brother and nephew, respectively. We heard Francesco’s “Dixit Dominus” and “Messa a 16,” both works which featured four SATB choirs (16 people), resulting in an enormously complex texture. But what drew me in was a hyper-performance of Vivaldi’s “Gloria,” with such exuberant tempos I was on the edge of my seat. I tried to figure out how fast the opening movement went — perhaps 160 to the eighth note! For a piece that is so well-known, my heart was racing, as the performance was so exciting!

My friend Rich Arenschieldt posted this on Facebook, which captured the audio of this moment.

It had been another long day — in the morning we had taken a two-hour walk called “Elgar’s Homes and Haunts.” Edward Elgar (1857-1934) was the son of an organist and played the organ and violin since the age of eight. He is considered Worcester’s favorite son, and there is a statue of him across from Worcester Cathedral. I was surprised to learn that Elgar was self-taught as a composer. After he accepted an honorary doctorate from Yale University, his “Pomp and Circumstance” became famous at school graduations. However, according to one source, “The composer became jaded by the work’s popularity and relentless jingoism and grew to resent how it overshadowed the rest of his oeuvre.”

On the walk we passed by Elgar’s former home across from Worcester Cathedral, St. George’s Catholic Church where his father was an organist, and later where Elgar was organist; the garden where Elgar used to walk; a Glee Club where he held rehearsals, and the Guildhall where he was recognized as a “freeman of the city.” I was amused by Elgar’s portrait above the sign for the toilets!

In the evening, the concert was called “Mass for the Endangered,” based on the large work on the second half of the program, but there was also music by Cameron Biles-Liddell, Judith Weir, and Elgar’s “Serenade for Strings.” Judith Weir, whose music we sang at the Lutheran Church of Honolulu, was present at the concert and was recognized by the conductor.

The “Mass for the Endangered” was composed by American Sarah Kirkland Snider, and was commissioned by Trinity Wall Street. This was a hugely difficult work for the choir with a high tessitura and they sang it extremely well. According to the program, it is “a hymn for the voiceless and the discounted, a requiem for the not-yet-gone. Using original text by writer, visual artist and musician Nathaniel Bellows, in combination with the traditional Latin, Mass for the Endangered embodies a prayer for endangered animals and the imperilled environments in which they live.” It was full of interesting dissonance which reminded me a little of Stravinsky.

Here is an excerpt from the Credo: We believe in the blessing of wing, angelic, ingenious – every soaring thing. We believe in the holy pelt and fin, hoary hide and shell. The armor of every beast is blessed, adorned in their own regalia. Mercy, now, on all animalia. Take no tooth or tusk, steal no heart, hair, or husk. Et expecto… No shark robbed of its fin, no mink denied its skin. resurrectionem mortuorum et vitam venturi saeculi… No bath in bowls of salted blood And I await the life of the world to come… no cove for corpse, no reddened veldt.

The complete piece has been posted to YouTube and can be heard here.