Music Making and Civic Imagination: A Holistic Philosophy

by Dave Camlin

Overview

An argument for the ethical applications and uses of music.

Music Making and Civic Imagination makes a powerful case for the potential of music to aid in human flourishing. Dave Camlin, a musician and educator, lays out a holistic philosophy of music, acknowledging the complex web of meaning that spreads across its many complementary dimensions. As a performance of ethical human values of love, reciprocity, and justice, the making of music, Camlin shows, can help facilitate ethical human connection and be a resource for both imagining and inhabiting the kind of world we might wish to live in.
 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781835951781
Publisher:	Intellect, Limited
Publication date:	10/31/2025
Series:	Music, Community, and Education
Pages:	236
Product dimensions:	6.69(w) x 9.61(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Dave Camlin lectures in music education at the Royal College of Music and Trinity-Laban Conservatoire.
 

Table of Contents

Foreword
Acknowledgements

PART 1 INTRODUCTION
1.Music in an Uncertain World
- An uncertain future
- The value of musicing
- Hysteresis
- Changing value of music
- Key themes 
- Musicing, musicking, ‘musicians’ and musician–researchers
- Musician-as-researcher 
- Being human
- Diffraction/waveform interference
- Terrapolis
- Bumps in the road
- Inequalities of cultural access
- Devaluation of music 
- Summary
- Who is this book for?
- Structure and contents
2.Libraries Gave Us Power
- This is my truth…
- Sage Gateshead and beyond
- Praxis
- Thinking about music 

PART 2 THINKING ABOUT MUSIC
3. Music as a Complex Adaptive System
- 600+ Mechanisms
- Complex adaptive systems (CAS)
- Music as a polyvalent system
- The advocacy trap
- All roads lead to complexity
- Music as gestalt
- Music in human evolution
- Music as communicative medium
- Entrainment 
- Communicative musicality
- What’s love got to do with it?
- What is love anyway?
- The limbic system
- Interpersonal neurobiology 
- Feeling felt
- What’s music got to do with it?
- Agential realism
- Entanglement and intra-action 
- Diffraction 
- Apparatus
- The aesthetic ‘cut’
- Music as a vitality 
- ‘Affect’ attunement 
- Conclusion 
4. Performing Works, Performing Relationships 
- Background
- Sage Gateshead
- Praxis
- Music in three dimensions
- Dimensions
- Musical dimensions
- Aesthetic – The performance of musical ‘Works’
- Participatory – The ‘Performance’ of relationships 
- Musical continuum
- Paramusical dimension 
- Assumptions
- Reflective questions
- Holistic 
- Holistic assumptions 
- Reflective questions
- Implications
- Holistic philosophy of music 
- Quality is contingent 
- Dialogue 
- Dissensus 
- Epistemology 
- Praxis 
- Conclusion 
5. Music, Politics and Society
- Honourable and dishonourable traditions
- The ‘polis’ 
- Bonding and bridging social capital 
- Feeling felt
- Musical citizens 
- Music and the family 
- Music and the community
- Limits of human cooperation
- Music and the people
- Music and the nation-state 
- Music and national identity 
- Estonian singing revolution 
- Music as a national political resource 
- Injustice and the difference principle 
- Vigilance
- Rational communities of music 
- Doxa 
- Intervention 
- The community of those who have nothing in common 
- Addressing cultural inequalities 
- Application of knowledge 
- The word ‘cope’ and the word ‘change’
6. Music Making and Civic Imagination
- Citizens of the planet 126
- Cosmopolitanism 127
- Critics of cosmopolitanism 128
- Post-nationalism 129
- Terrapolitanism 130
- What is civic imagination? 132
- Dialects of civic imagination 133
- Disavowal of politics 136
- Sovereignty of the states 137
- European project as civic imagination 139
- Music making and civic imagination 141
- Music and the dialects of civic imagination 142
- Disavowal of politics through artistic expression 143
- Vigilance as qualifier 145
- Music’s floating intentionality 146
- Mobilization of terrapolitan identity 147
- Intertextuality 148
- Terrapolitanism is not a competition 149
- The performance of values 151
- Nationalist/capitalist values 152
- Humanist values 152
- Performing love 153
- Performing reciprocity 154
- Performing justice 154
- Performance of virtue 155
- Problems of humanism 156
- Musicing in a post-human world 156
- Musical citizens of the planet 158
- Music and the universe next door 159
- Practical applications 161

PART 3 PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS
7. This Musician
- Socially engaged student performances at Sage Gateshead
- Example 1: We are who we can be
- Example 2: Big about Corby
- Example 3: Fram fest
- Example 4: Disability dilemmas
- Assessing quality
- Student encounters with participatory music at the Royal College of Music
- Participatory projects
- This place
- These people
8. Musician Education
- What are we educating musicians for?
- What is music for?
- Portfolio careers in music
- Praxis
- Skills, attributes and values
- Authenticity
- Diffractive pedagogy
- Organizational dynamics
- Situational music education pedagogy 
- Situational leadership 
- Limitations 
- Conclusions

References
Index