What’s music for? Is music better than a nice bath or a scented candle? All questions I answer definitively in my piece today for @guardian .
With thanks to the wonderful @alicevincentwrites for speaking to me about her stunning new book, ‘Hark: How Women Listen’, which shifted how I think about sound and the patriarchy, and is now available to preorder. Also check out @clemencybh ‘s truly beautiful BBC documentary ‘My Brain: After the Rupture’, if you haven’t caught it already. And finally @daniellevitinofficial ‘Music as Medicine’, which I haven’t been able to stop thinking about since reading. There’s some really inspiring and nuanced thinking and communicating around the importance of music and listening going on at the moment and it’s exciting to see.
Link in my story. @septemberpublishing
Dunno what my dad would have made of me talking about him on @bbcwomanshour , but I had a blast. How WILD to be on something I’ve been listening to forever, talking about music and grief with @bbcnuala . Bonus: got to listen to fab discussions from the green room about a) contraception and b) women in the Church of England.
If you missed it and want to hear what a great job I did of not sounding nervous while being really quite terrified, you can catch it again this afternoon on Weekend Woman’s Hour, 4pm @bbcradio4 and on @bbcsounds . X
@septemberpublishing@duck_books
✨ Talking about grief at @theheathbookshop Literature and Music Festival!
Thank you to @theheathbookshop for asking me to be part of their festival. I had the pleasure of interviewing @emjmacgregor about her book taking a look at life after losing her father. Her book is raw, honest and a powerful look at grief that helps you to feel seen in how complicated and different life is post the death of a significant person in your life.
If this sounds like something you need to read, please do pick it up. Emily writes in a way that feels safe and comforting even though it is a difficult topic.
#heathbookshopfestival #bookfestival
‘Well… that was a surprisingly fun conversation about death!’ — audience feedback
Thanks so much to everyone who turned out to discuss ‘While the Music Lasts’ and share stories of grief and music as part of @theheathbookshop ‘s Music and Literature festival. And thanks to Aarti Kumari @w.r.cbookclub for such considered questions and her enormous warmth.
The festival runs until tomorrow and there are loads of great events still to come if you’re in Birmingham including @faberbooks@maxmaxporter Max Porter-inspired dance, @wordsbynatasha talking about her book Assembly, a crime panel, a night of alternative 80s music with the drummer from The Smiths, and of course no festival is complete without a Big Gay Poetry Night with open mic. What a ridiculously fantastic thing, what a treat to be a part of it, and basically I now wish I lived in Birmingham.
⭐️ FESTIVAL SPOTLIGHT ⭐️
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.
Dr Emily MacGregor is a musicologist and cultural historian, broadcaster and author, as well as a visiting research fellow at King’s College London and editor-at-large for classical music at Faber.
Aarti Kumari is the creator of the Women Who Redefine Colour Bookclub. A feminist bookclub for women from diverse backgrounds in Birmingham, championing diverse literature from around the world.
Tickets for all our festival events are available at theheathbookshop.co.uk
This event is part of The Heath Bookshop Literature & Music Festival and is supported by National Lottery Project Grants Funding through Arts Council England.
Gorgeous review of While the Music Lasts in @the.tls today! Thrilled at such a thoughtful and elegant engagement with what I hoped to achieve with the book. Thank you 🙏
@septemberpublishing@duck_books
What a lovely thing to happen: While the Music Lasts was in the @the.tls Books of the Year round up. Thanks to everyone who’s supported me in this great big leap into the unknown with a new book about music and loss and dreams.
It’s of course never not the perfect time to nab your Times Literary Supplement-endorsed stocking filler—link in bio.
@septemberpublishing@duck_books
Such a privilege to chat with two inspirational writers and thinkers, Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason @thekannehmasons and Ellie Chan @thoroughlyearlymodernellie last night at @hatchardspiccadilly .
Ellie’s just-released, remarkable ‘Duet: An Artful History of Music’ is a capacious, sweeping exploration and history of the ways in which we see music, transporting us across time and place to make sense of the ways in which visual culture and music have always been deeply intertwined. Think the art and global origins of writing notes, the aesthetics of musical instruments, and a good dash of steam-punk-esque kaleidoscopic Victorian colour organs—just to whet your appetite.
Kadiatu’s graceful and moving book ‘To Be Young, Gifted, and Black’ grapples with what it means to be a young Black musician in the UK today, told through her experiences alongside incisive interviews with her brilliant family. It’s an incredible act of generosity to be invited behind the curtain into her and her family’s lives and discussions, and so very important for the times we’re living through.
Wide-ranging discussion touched on why it’s important to bring human bodies (and difference) back into classical music—something often thought of as apolitical or transcendent—music education in UK state schools, English identity, musical notation around the world, psalm books, the importance of play, and Ellie’s lost childhood flute… or did her brother hide it?!
Thanks to the lovely audience who came down for the event and asked such thoughtful questions, and to @duck_books for organising a really memorable evening.
Both books are available at all good bookshops and libraries!
We are very excited to see Eleanor Chan @thoroughlyearlymodernellie and Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason @thekannehmasons in conversation at Hatchards @hatchardspiccadilly next week.
Why not join them – and our Chair, musicologist and broadcaster Emily MacGregor @emjmacgregor – for a fascinating evening discussing how music has threaded through human history and artistic self-expression?
In Duet: An Artful History of Music Chan explores the inter-relationships of sound and vision, music and art. Taking us on an exhilarating journey that encompasses a 35,000-year-old flute found in a German cave, Kandinsky's kaleidoscopic paintings, illuminated manuscripts and haute couture, we discover a long historical interplay of music and art. But what might it mean to to trulyseemusic?
Kadiatu Kanneh-Mason’s memoir, House of Music: Raising the Kanneh-Masons, won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Storytelling Award and her most recent book is To Be Young, Gifted and Black. Through conversations with her extraordinarily gifted family, all classical musicians, Kanneh-Mason explores what it’s like to come of age in these turbulent times, when Black artistic self-expression is so often met with disparagement and abuse online – and offers a hopeful, powerful way through.
Emily MacGregor is a writer, broadcaster, and music historian. Her book While the Music Lasts offers an erudite, lyrical, gently humorous and healing journey in making and participating in music.
Why does music make us laugh or cry? Come and hear @emjmacgregor talk about her new book, described as "a memoir of music, grief and joy". Details on the Festival website.
The artist and former neuropsychiatrist Ken Barrett picked up my book in the @aldeburghbookshop , and that chance encounter got me an invite onto his wonderfully thoughtful and wide ranging podcast, bringing together the arts, humanities and neuroscience.
It’s not often you get to have such a smart, deep and moving conversation about music, grief, academia and the brain. Do check out the other episodes—there are amazing conversations there about all the big things: art, consciousness and even medicinal psychedelics, which I’m currently researching for a future project. Link in my story.
Also Ken sketches all his guests ☺️
@brainlandcollective@septemberpublishing
