Written for anyone who is interested in our complex, joyful, knotty lifelong relationships with music, or has navigated a period of loss or change during which they’ve stopped being sure quite who they are.

When her father dies, music historian and trombonist Dr Emily MacGregor finds that music has become too much. Listening, let alone playing, music is suddenly too difficult. This is problematic given that she’s a broadcaster, writer and academic working with 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, exquisitely crucial in the evoking of memories?

Praise for While the Music Lasts

‘alternately erudite and anecdotal … sparingly but beautifully drawn. …[MacGregor] shows not only that music is about “the looping around of time, the return, the revisiting” but also that, in allowing us to revisit the past, it strengthens emotional, psychological and spiritual connections, making us more truly who we already are’ Catherine Coldstream, Times Literary Supplement

‘Beautiful, moving, and rigorously honest. … MacGregor’s story resonated powerfully with me and will, I am sure, with many more’ Jonathan Arnold, Church Times

‘MacGregor is good in contrasting the amateur experience of music and the chillier, more codified relationship of the professional’ Alexandra Coghlan, Gramophone Magazine

‘Superb’ Nicholas Mathew, Cambridge Opera Journal

‘Beautifully written… A powerful testament that music is life’ Michael Spitzer, author of The Musical Human: A History of Life on Earth

‘Emily MacGregor takes two things people are often scared of – classical music, and death – and makes them winningly accessible, warm, funny and real. This book is as finely tuned as the very best of orchestras. I loved it’ Alice Vincent, author of Rootbound: Rewilding a Life, and Why Women Grow

‘Touching and beautifully crafted’, Sir Stephen Hough, pianist, composer and author of Enough: Scenes from Childhood

‘Combines the grace and erudition of a great essayist with the deep and howling humanity of a proper novel. It’s the best book I’ve read on grief – and possibly one of the finest on music too’ Oskar Jensen, author of Vagabonds (shortlisted for the Wolfson History Prize)

‘A profound, erudite and moving book about grief and a personal unwinding that slowly becomes about so much more: about families, dogs, friends, sounds, language, travel and silence. A meditation on what it means to be human – constantly witty, wistful and stimulating’ Tobias Jones, author of The Dark Heart of Italy

‘This is a book about all the big things in life – time, memory, grief, death, the loss of a parent. It’s also about music and (just possibly) its power to save us’ Rachel Morris, author of The Museum Makers