Emily MacGregor
Emily MacGregor
Music history | Memoir
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.
While The Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief and Joy
‘Emily MacGregor takes two things people are often scared of – classical music, and death – and made 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 WHY WOMEN GROW AND HARK
‘A book about grief that transforms into a book about life. MacGregor explores her relationships and work with an intensity leavened by warmth and wry humour. Finally, joyously, music and love break through’
LAURA TUNBRIDGE, AUTHOR OF BEETHOVEN: A LIFE IN NINE PIECES
MORE PRAISE
‘While the Music Lasts 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. Make no mistake, this is the heavy stuff, but I can think of no better nor more brilliant guide than Emily MacGregor’
OSKAR JENSEN, AUTHOR OF VAGABONDS
‘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’