While the Music Lasts

When her father dies, music historian and trombonist Dr Emily MacGregor finds that music has become too much. Listening, let alone playing, is too difficult to cope with, and she can’t listen to anything anymore. This is problematic given that she’s a broadcaster, writer and academic working with classical music.

It leads her on a journey of discovery: from the arrangement of an Isaac Albéniz piece she finds on her father’s guitar stand, through encounters with psychologists, orchestras, summer schools and funeral celebrants, to the lives and works of individual composers who wrote music so often in the midst of loss. What is it about our experience of music that cuts so sharply to the heart of our emotions? And why is it more than any other artform painfully, exquistely crucial in the evoking of memories?

An erudite, lyrical, gently humourous and healing journey to rediscover the purpose of making and participating in music.

Dr Emily MacGregor is a writer, broadcaster, and music historian. She appears regularly on BBC Radio 3 and 4, and has written for the Guardian. Her academic CV includes a doctorate from Oxford University and subsequent research positions at Harvard University and King’s College London, where she’s currently based. She’s the author of Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933 (Cambridge University Press) and is winner of the Jerome Roche Prize. Emily cohabits in London with an unapologetically fluffy dog.