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The Shiver-Shimmer Factor: Musical Spirituality, Emotion, and Education

This article offers one approach to exploring the question of in what sense music educators can speak of music and its moving power as spiritual by inquiring into what might count as a “musical spiritual experience” in emotional terms. The essay’s analytic framework employs the distinction between two related concepts which I call the “shiver” and the “shimmer” factors. The shiver factor is the physiological phenomenon of the “fingers-up-and-down-the-spine” feeling often experienced when listening to or performing a musical work. Employing an example from popular culture, this section of the essay evaluates “critical thinking” as a pedagogical tool for unpacking various mediarelated elements used to precipitate particular kinds of effects in respondents. The shimmer factor draws upon a combination of Csikszenthmihalyi’s “flow” and the Jungian conception of “soul-making” as a way of distinguishing a genuinely transcendent, transformational musical experience from a sensate, surface aesthetic encounter.