While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief & Joy

An illuminating, witty and highly moving story of making and listening to music and its role and impact on grief. 

‘It’s curious that we don’t really understand why music is able to tip us over the edge. If you want to feel totally overpowered by grief, reach for some music. If you want to feel close to the person who’s died, there’s music that will take you there. That’s because music is a thing we inhabit … And it’s seriously powerful. But it’s not always desirable. It starts to feel like you can come apart anywhere.’

After her jazz guitarist father’s sudden death, Emily MacGregor, a music historian and trombonist, finds herself unable to listen to, let alone play, study or enjoy, music. It is only when she starts to work through the pieces left behind on her father’s music stand – a journey from tangos to Handel, Cádiz to Coltrane – that she begins to understand why her body and mind are rejecting the thing that bound them, and she is able leave the numb silence behind and find joy in sound once again.

‘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

 

‘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 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

 

‘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