Emily MacGregor

While the Music Lasts

(Event 10: Sat 11 Oct 2025 3.00pm  Oldham Hall, Church Street, Great Missenden)

 

Dr Emily MacGregor is a writer, music historian, and broadcaster based at King’s College London. Communicating to wide audiences about music and culture is at the heart of her work: she’s written frequently for The Guardian and also appears regularly as a music expert on BBC Radio. She completed a doctorate in music at Oxford University and then held positions in Berlin and at Harvard, before finding her way to London where she initially taught at Royal Holloway. In a past life she played classical and jazz trombone.

Emily’s latest book, While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief, and Joy, came out earlier this year and seeks to untangle the relationship between music and loss. When her father died, Emily found that music had become too much for her. Listening to, let alone playing, music suddenly became too difficult. Given that she’s a broadcaster, writer and academic working with classical music, this was – to say the least – problematic.

She was led on a journey of discovery: from the arrangement of an Albéniz piece she found 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? 

“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

emilymacgregor.co.uk/