My father’s guitar playing was the wallpaper to my childhood: jazz riffs over cassette-recorded backing tracks, cascading classical arpeggios. It wasn’t just music: I can’t untangle it in my memory from what it meant simply to be, and to belong. We moved around a lot while I was growing up because of my dad’s job in journalism; amidst unpacked boxes in unfamiliar rooms, the sound of the guitar was what made new homes distinctly ours. There's an introversion to the guitar, and as I remember him, he’s always practising alone.
Dr Emily MacGregor, Visiting Fellow in Music
19 May 2025
While the Music Lasts: academic's story behind the exploration of music and grief
Dr Emily MacGregor’s new book, While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief, and Joy, is out now.
After her jazz guitarist father’s sudden death, Dr Emily MacGregor, a music historian and trombonist, found herself unable to listen to, let alone play, study or enjoy, music. It is only when she started to work through the pieces left behind on her father’s music stand – from tangos to Handel, Cadiz to Coltrane – that she began to understand why her body and mind were rejecting the thing that bound them.
In her latest book, While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief, and Joy, Dr Emily MacGregor explores the relationship between music and loss and documents her efforts to find joy in sound once again. ‘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,’ the author says.
Dr Emily MacGregor discovered how little scholars understand about the relationship between music and grief — relatively little research has been done around the topic. 'I spoke to many different people while working on the book—from academic music historians and music psychologists to funeral directors and faith leaders—to approach the question from multiple perspectives and via a number of approaches,' says Dr MacGregor, 'But one thing all this underlined, and one of the things I think is most fascinating about intellectual engagement with music, is that there are no clear-cut answers. Time and again thinking about music brings us up against the boundaries of what it’s possible to know.'
The morning my father died, someone wise told me to do whatever feels right—there are no rules for grief. What I learned is that how people relate to music after a death is no different. Some people find comfort in music; others can’t listen to it at all. It's quite normal to avoid particular pieces, for instance those closely associated with the person who’s died, like music that was played at the funeral, or in the hospital. Many people’s relationship with music changes as time goes on. For me, though, it never became what I’d describe as a coping mechanism; instead, music gave me a way of learning how to play again, in all senses of the word, in a landscape that was irrevocably changed. It helped me learn how to become myself again.
Dr Emily MacGregor, Visiting Fellow in Music
While The Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief and Joy by Dr Emily MacGregor was published by September Publishing in March 2025. Find out more about the book here.
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
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
Dr Emily MacGregor is a writer, broadcaster, music historian and a Visiting Fellow in Music at King’s. She joined the Department of Music in 2020 on a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship. Dr MacGregor’s broad research interests centre on music and the politics of space and subjectivity, as explored in her first book, Interwar Symphonies and the Imagination: Politics, Identity, and the Sound of 1933 (Cambridge University Press, 2023). Her most recent research has resulted in a co-edited volume with Emily I. Dolan and Arman Schwartz: Sonic Circulations: Music, Modernism, and the Politics of Knowledge, to be published later in 2025.
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Visiting Fellow