Music can heal us - but it doesn't need to have a purpose

A string of books and a new radio station beg the question: cant we just listen to music for music's sake?

- Emily MacGregor

Growing up, I never questioned the intrinsic value of classical music.

My father practising classical and jazz guitar was the aural wallpaper to my childhood, and at my rural state school I took lessons on the recorder, the violin, the cello, the trombone, the piano. The after-school clubs on offer included, somewhat implausibly, an ocarina ensemble. Music was art, and wasn’t art the point of it all, when you got right down to it? The reason to live, after we cater for all our basic needs? It was certainly what led me to become first a classical musician, and then a music historian.

But when my dad died unexpectedly in 2019, it threw my relationship with music into sharp relief. All of a sudden, I couldn’t bear listening to it. It was too painful, or it grated on my nerves and made me angry. I started to question how and why music mattered to me. And, as I learned to care about it again, I started to wonder about the ways in which music might care for me in return.