I’m a musician – singer/composer/educator/researcher – based in Northern England, and I’ve become fascinated through my community music work to see how music can change people’s experience – of themselves, of other people, of their community and their relationship to the world around them. With all of the complex challenges we currently face as a species, I’m interested in the potential of music-making as a resource to help us navigate toward a more hopeful future. Making music is an important part of our unique collective history as humans – and we need to draw on it now to help us evolve into a species that can live more harmoniously and sustainably on our fragile planet.
I wrote
Music Making and Civic Imagination: A Holistic Philosophy
There are lots of great books about music in human evolution, but this one conjures up such beautiful images and makes such a strong argument that it’s still my favourite.
The human species is over 230,000 years old, and we’ve probably been using singing as a form of social bonding for that whole time, and previous hominid species probably were as well. The book makes the point really well that singing is something we take for granted, but is really quite a remarkable human evolutionary adaptation.
The propensity to make music is the most mysterious, wonderful, and neglected feature of humankind: this is where Steven Mithen began, drawing together strands from archaeology, anthropology, psychology, neuroscience--and, of course, musicology--to explain why we are so compelled to make and hear music. But music could not be explained without addressing language, and could not be accounted for without understanding the evolution of the human body and mind. Thus Mithen arrived at the wildly ambitious project that unfolds in this book: an exploration of music as a fundamental aspect of the human condition, encoded into the human genome during the…
This book blew my mind when I first read it, and it’s one that I keep on coming back to.
Written in accessible language by one of the most eminent researchers in music and neuroscience, the book explains not just the mechanics of how the brain processes music, but also why it moves us so much. Breaking it all down like this provides a remarkable insight into why music is at the heart of human experience.
In this groundbreaking union of art and science, rocker-turned-neuroscientist Daniel J. Levitin explores the connection between music-its performance, its composition, how we listen to it, why we enjoy it-and the human brain.
Taking on prominent thinkers who argue that music is nothing more than an evolutionary accident, Levitin poses that music is fundamental to our species, perhaps even more so than language. Drawing on the latest research and on musical examples ranging from Mozart to Duke Ellington to Van Halen, he reveals:
* How composers produce some of the most pleasurable effects of listening to music by exploiting the way…
This is a fantastic personal account of music’s power by David Byrne, the lead singer from the US band Talking Heads.
He mixes theory with fascinating insights from a life on the road as a musician, and provides a truly unique perspective on our fascination with music. The section on how our listening environment – whether that’s a concert hall, CBGBs, or our car – shapes the kind of music we listen to is really insightful.
We make music backwards, he suggests, to fit the environment we’re going to listen to it in.
How Music Works is David Byrne's buoyant celebration of a subject he has spent a lifetime thinking about.
Equal parts historian and anthropologist, raconteur and social scientist, Byrne draws on his own work over the years with Talking Heads, Brian Eno, and his myriad collaborators - along with journeys to Wagnerian opera houses, African villages, and anywhere music exists - to show that music-making is not just the act of a solitary composer in a studio, but rather a logical, populist, and beautiful result of cultural circumstance.
A brainy, irresistible adventure, How Music Works is an impassioned argument about music's…
Tia DeNora is a brilliant sociologist who writes a lot about music, and this book makes a great argument for music as a resource, or what she calls a ‘technology of self’.
We use music to shape our identity, and drawing on Erving Goffman’s ideas about ‘asylums’, she suggests that music is one such space we create in our lives where we can find ourselves again. Being musical becomes an integral part of being human.
Music has always been somewhere I’ve found solace and freedom, and I know that it’s the same for lots of the people I work with, and this book really explains why that’s so.
Taking a cue from Erving Goffman's classic work, Asylums, Tia DeNora develops a novel interdisciplinary framework for music, health and wellbeing. Considering health and illness both in medical contexts and in the often-overlooked realm of everyday life, DeNora argues that these identities are by no means mutually exclusive. Moreover, she suggests that the promotion of health and more specifically, mental health, involves a great deal more than a concern with medication, genetic predispositions, clinical and neuro-scientific procedures. Adopting a holistic, interactionist focus, Music Asylums reconnects states of wellness and wellbeing to encounters with others and - critically - to opportunities…
The authors of this book are all people whose collective work over decades has constantly shaped my own understanding of music, part of a movement to argue that music’s greatest potential comes in the ‘doing’ of it, not just the listening to it.
This book asks important questions about what are we – as musicians and artists of all stripes – going to do with our artistry to improve our worlds. There are lots of great examples in the book of how Art making can change our experience, and re-connect us with our common humanity.
We are all artists if we want to be, and together we can use our artistry to build the kind of worlds we actually wish to live in.
This first-of-its-kind compendium unites perspectives from artists, scholars, arts educators, policymakers and activists to investigate the complex system of values surrounding artistic-educational endeavors. Addressing a range of artistic domains, ranging from music and dance, to visual arts and storytelling, contributors offer an exploration and criticism of the conventions that govern our interactions with these practices. Artistic Citizenship focuses the responsibilities, and functions of amateur as well as professional artists in society, and introduces a novel set of ethics that are conventionally dismissed in discourses on the topic. The authors address the questions: How does the concept of citizenship relate to…
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, Camlin shows how the making of music 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.
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
Locked In Locked Out: Surviving a Brainstem Stroke
After Dr. Shawn Jennings, a busy family physician, suffered a brainstem stroke on May 13, 1999, he woke from a coma locked inside his body, aware and alert but unable to communicate or move. Once he regained limited movement in his left arm, he began typing his story, using one hand and a lot of patience.
With unexpected humour and tender honesty, Shawn shares his experiences in his struggle for recovery and acceptance of his life after the stroke. He affirms that even without achieving a full recovery life is still worth…
