Join Dr Emily MacGregor as she talks about her non-fiction book While The Music Lasts. Emily will be in conversation with Aarti Kumari, from Women Who Redefine Colour Bookclub.

When her father dies, music historian and trombonist Dr Emily MacGregor finds that music has become too much. Listening to, 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.

An erudite, lyrical, gently humorous and healing journey to rediscover the purpose of making and participating in music.

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. She is also editor-at-large for classical music at Faber. Emily cohabits in London with an unapologetically fluffy dog.

 Aarti Kumari is the creator of the Women Who Redefine Colour Bookclub. Now in its third year, it started as a space to bring women from diverse backgrounds together who love to champion and read diverse literature from around the world. The book club provides a safe space for discussions around sensitive but important topics such as Palestine, the missing and murdered indigenous women and girls in North America, refugee stories, the Partition and what it means to be a Black woman in the UK. If you want to know more about the bookclub you can follow @w.r.cbookclub on Instagram.

This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Grants Funding through Arts Council England.