The Gift of cutis anserina

Vern Falby, at the Lasker Summer Music Festival, June 26, 2009
The Lasker Summer Music Festival is a recurring celebration of three gifts of God:

Life
Music
and Meaning.

We are all drawn to this place by our love of music, and it is safe to say that those present will continue: to make music if we are professionals and to listen if we are audience members—or both. What we music lovers may tend to do less routinely, or at least as consistently as we might, is to explore and celebrate connections between our music and other aspects of our lives. Lasker, however, is a venue where such exploration and celebration of the meaning of music making, and most especially its spiritual significance, is sanctioned, and the fact that I have always tended to ask, especially at the beginnings of courses, about what is important in our musical experience probably explains why Charles and Kathy have kept asking me back to offer one perspective on these matters.

In preparing this years talk I reviewed several of my past Lasker Festival presentations and discovered that whatever the line of inspiration I might have been pursuing, I have always tended be drawn to the phenomenon of goosebumps. I guess my regular return to this topic is not surprising, as it is common knowledge and expectation that our experience of goosebumps in listening is linked with our musical experiences that are the most transcendent and the most transformative. But today, rather than referring to goosebumps in the course of some other line of inquiry, I would like to focus on them.

In a conversation once with the late violinist Berl Senofsky, one of the grand old men and women of Peabody when I arrived there in 1989, he and I agreed that our work was all about goosebumps: his job as a studio teacher was to assist his students in playing so well as to prompt them in listeners, and my job as a music theorist was to assist those students in comprehending and utilizing what it was in their music that causes goosebumps in the first place.

Just this last Monday, I received an e-mail from a fellow member of this festival and Peabody alumnus David Sullivan, now working on his doctorate up at Harvard. He had no idea about the topic of my Lasker talk this year, but he was contacting me in search of any ideas I might have concerning his thesis, whose subject is, perhaps less-than-strangely enough, GOOSEBUMPS and music. In reply, I tossed back the following musings in a return message, slightly edited for use here:

“Some initial observations/intuitions:

“Our experience of goose bumps is a recognition that we are experiencing stylistic integrity in music. This reaction flags for us the sense that we are hearing something authentic, authorial, genuine and unique. This strong and direct quality of music has to do with it’s being not about things but a form of unmediated action, presentational (communicated in pure action) rather than discoursive (as in engaging in discourse about something).

“The design of music is exactly analogous to, and even enacts in processes of sound, the waxing and waning of emotion and the flow our inner life. It is pure human-to-human gesture (I suspect Divine-to-human, too), direct and undistracted by . . .  anything.

“Goosebumps can be prompted by our recognition of the power of the music we are hearing as an introversive thing (autonomous or self-referential [literally from the Latin vertere, turning and intro, inward], that is to say, prompted by our recognition of power in the organization of the music itself or in its relation to other pieces or styles of music. Goosebumps have something to do with surpassing competence in music: in its pattern completion, its saturation of our attention to one or more musical aspects, its very satisfactoriness. This applies to the contributions of both composers and performers. Goosebumps are a sign of our identification with the competence of the performer: the performer is taking a risk for listeners’ benefit and pulling it off! This is a thrilling thing to witness.

“We can also experience goosebumps at the power of music to evoke connections with things outside of and beyond the music we are hearing. That is to say that the power of music can also be extroversive (programmatic or referential to things outside the aural text [literally vertere, turning extro, outward], prompted by and accompanying the recognition of the significance of the music to participants in its culture, to their history, to their achievements and to their lost causes. (For example, I most exquisitely “got” pipe band music as I heard a parade of featuring a number pipebands coming toward us from far off down the High Street in Forres, Scotland—the town from which both my wife Doreen and King Duncan from Macbeth hail—swelling in waves of sound, echoing off the stone buildings, inevitably and inexorably intensifying as they approached and yielding to the next band after they had passed us. There was a day when those pipes would have inspired Scottish dreams of independence from the English; the music of those pipes is much of what is left of those dreams. Surely music is not miraculous sound object alone; it can be cultural totem.)”

In summary: goosebumps are something we experience in our highest-level contact with music of greatness and of great expressive power. And the very highest-most level experience of music for a person of faith tends to be an indexical sign (a pointer) indicating and celebrating the ultimate excellence of God.

I have a feeling though that there is something even more elemental about the relationship of goosebumps, music, and the Divine.

Medically speaking, goosebumps are a physical phenomenon with the technical name horripilation (from the Latin roots horribilis for bristling or standing on end in fear and dread, and pil for hair). They are caused by the activation of small muscles that contract and lead to hair follicles actually standing on end. We share the experience with other of our mammalian brethren, such as porcupines (famous for raising their quills when threatened) or shark-hunted sea otters. It is probably impossible to know whether these animal cousins of ours can experience this phenomenon when feeling awe or inspiration, but surely we human beings can and do.

What do our goosebumps have to do with the fight or flight response of horripilation experienced by other animals? An animal individual reacts to the POWER of whatever it fears. As human beings we can experience goosebumps in response to any powerful stimulus. In my 2002 Lasker message, I listed some of these stimuli:

“virtually anything that moves us, for some examples, a memorial service (or even the memory of a loved one), a patriotic thrill, a glimpse of the wonder of nature, a glimpse of the wonder of children, a feeling of connection to a beloved pet, a particularly striking speech or poem or movie, a particularly revelatory conversation with a friend. My sense is that different people experience this feeling in different ways and in response to different things. For me, being moved is something that flows over me like a wave. I get tingles. My eyes well-up with tears. I am completely filled; I cannot speak.”

When we get goosebumps about anything, we are overcome with a sudden sensation that we are in the presence of something powerful, as the atavistically programmed stem of our brain prompts in us a reaction similar to an animal’s in the presence of something more powerful than itself.

Music gives us those goosebumps. We feel awe and sense its positive and benign power. And for many of us (including notable past colleagues such as J.S. Bach with his dedication of his works to “To the Greater Glory of God,” and G.F. Handel in his report to his servant about his composition of Messiah’s “Hallelujah” Chorus: “I saw Heaven opened and the host of it worshiping the Glory of God”) this experience points to the ultimate power and the ultimate creativity—think of the magnificent symphony of nature—of Almighty God.

It is my intuition is that goosebumps are our response to our sense of the presence of God right behind, or even, acting through music. We sense in the talent and excellence of art a sort of human natural wonder too excellent to come from our own efforts alone. We are made in the image of God; God creates us, we create art, with the power both to point towards Divine excellence and to evoke in us recognition of a competence in well-made music something so synergistic, so much bigger than the sum of or capability of the parts of its human creators, that we react with horripilation essentially out of our fear of . . . the Lord.

Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia quickly becoming for many the “source” of initial resort, defines “fear of the Lord” as:

“one of the Seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, as described in Isaiah 11:2-3 (also known as wonder and awe). In Proverbs 1:7 and 9:10, the fear of the Lord is called the beginning or foundation of wisdom. In Proverbs 15:33, the fear of the Lord is described as the "discipline" or "instruction" of wisdom. The Catholic Encyclopedia explains that this gift "fills us with a sovereign respect for God, and makes us dread, above all things, to offend Him."

In effect, we detect the very power of God reflected in great music. But why is this important to God or to us? A famous quotation from a work in another medium suggests an answer.

There is a revelatory speech in the 1981 film Chariots of Fire that reverberates through a lot of people’s souls and is often cited (just google it on the internet), for it is a case of a movie, in this case a real work of art, bearing witness to the excellence of which human beings are capable, but also, more generally. about human excellence bearing witness to—and for—the glory and the love of God.

Chariots of Fire as as you may recall tells the compelling real-life story of the track team fielded by Great Britain in the 1924 Olympic games and, specifically, the influences and life stories that brought members of the team to those games.

Eric Liddell is a runner for Scotland, but he comes from a missionary family, and his sister, Jennie, is concerned that his running is distracting his focus from their family’s missionary work in China. He takes Jennie on a walk in Holyrood Park below Arthur’s Seat, the crag that overlooks Edinburgh, where Eric has been finishing his Chemistry degree at the University. In one of the film’s many powerful scenes he says to Jenny:

“I’ve decided. I’m going back to China. The missionary service has accepted me.”

Jenny replies,

“Oh, I’m so pleased!”

And Eric continues in a soft, earnest, and gently urgent voice that seems to be an integral part of the culture of the Scottish church with which I am familiar by marriage (Rev. Peter Robertson, the minister who married my wife Doreen and I in Forres spoke in an uncannily similar manner), and the following should probably be imagined in that accent:

“But I’ve got a lot of running to do first. Jennie… Jennie, you’ve got to understand. I believe that God made me for a purpose. For China. But he also made me fast. And when I run… I feel his pleasure. To give it up would be to hold him in contempt. You were right. It’s not just fun. To win is to honour him.

This brings us to the Latin title of my talk, chosen to avoid any collision with R.L.’s contemporary children’s book series Goosebumps. Cutis anserina is the traditional and Latin medical term for horripilation, for goose bumps.

The literal meaning of the Latin cutis anserina is “goose skin.” Why is our most profound reaction to the divine gift of music called goosebumps anyway? Because that horripilation, the lifting up of hair follicles out of fear and awe, gives our skin an appearance something akin to the skin of a plucked goose.

We musicians may not run, but we do sing. And not akin perhaps to geese, who honk, but like so many other species of birds, our ability to sing and, in our case, our ability to detect the presence of God behind the song (as evidenced by those goosebumps prompted by our fear of the Lord)—these things themselves are surely gifts from God. Birds sing to invite, or to warn. We sing to worship and to feel the presence of God in the wash of shivers of goosebumps, to worship: essentially to know that the Lord is God; it is God that made us and we are God’s. That’s a lot of meaning for human effort, for our equivalent of birds’ singing songs on fence posts. Thanks be to God, indeed!