Music and remembering. The author wrote this book after losing her beloved father. She remembers him trying to encourage her to listen to classical music instead of T-Rex and Fleetwood Mac just as my own Dad did. I also remember seeing Walt Disney’s Fantasia at the cinema, not realising that the music was classical music until much later. The details of the lives of various composers, singers and musicians are fascinating and you really emphasise with Sanderson’s reminiscences about her father’s love for music and her own later love of it too. Poignant and moving.

The author of this memoir learned to love classical music during the writing process of this book, after her father passed away. Caroline Sanderson, who grew up in Leicestershire, attempts to make sense of why her father loved classical music. Despite his best attempts at getting her interested in the music, she was more into pop. In this book, she explores some CDs from his collection (originally he had reels of tape). Through a combination of research, intense listening, emotional response and visits to locations associated with the composers, she develops an appreciation of the music while claiming to struggle to write about it. She writes about music very well! I’m no expert on it – although I don’t think there is a right and wrong way – but I enjoyed how she articulated her responses. I especially enjoyed the chapter on Stravinsky, with its focus on ‘The Rite of Spring’ (i.e. the dinosaurs and volcanoes which terrified the author when she watched Disney’s Fantasia) and ‘The Firebird Suite’ (this appears in the sequel Fantasia 2000 although not mentioned in the book). The other chapters are on Mozart, Brahms, Robert & Clara Schumann, Chopin, Richard Strauss, Kathleen Ferrier and Sibelius. I learned a lot from these and it does make me want to check out more from these composers and performers. The book is almost unbearably sad at times, and like the saddest string sections in classical music, I didn’t really want to face it. However it’s a wonderfully-written book and I am sure her father would be proud.

Tender, moving memoir exploring the deep emotional ties between music, memory, and family, illuminating how music can be both a time capsule and a time machine. With poignancy and restraint, Sanderson celebrates the enduring resonance of sound in shaping identity and preserving moments.

This was a bit of a wild ride. I took my time with it, because of how emotional it was making me, but I really truly enjoyed it. It also came with many little coincidences and synchronicities that parallelled with my life, which I found interesting.

Funny story: The entire time I was reading this book, I was remembering a class I took in university about music and neuropsychology. I found the class fascinating but could not remember the teacher’s name. About 30% into the book, the author mentions going to a talk by by Dr. Catherine Loveday, whose name instantly sounds familiar, and who turned out to be the teacher who taught that very class I loved almost 6 years ago.

It was so interesting to read about all these composers and how their lives intertwined together. How their lives were. As well as how they affected the lives of their listeners. It was also heartwarming and emotional to read about the author’s relationship with her father and their love of music, one extremely similar to mine and my father’s (which is what first drew me to this book).

Listening to the symphonies in parallel with the chapters was really immersive. I usually like to read in silence, but I needed to know what the author was hearing and writing about. A lot of the symphonies I was familiar with thanks to my father introducing me to classical music (ha) and my mother’s piano playing throughout my childhood. I feel doing this made the experience of reading this beautiful book much better.

Each chapter focused on a composer or artist, their lives, their art, but this book is also about grief. And it was heartbreaking, I will admit I cried several times. Chopin, my favourite composer, was also my favorite chapter in this book, as well as the most emotional. I think this is a book I will come back to time and time again in the future, and one I have already recommended to several people who are excited to read it when it comes out.

As usual I’m going to be annoying and point out the same incorrect french that was used twice: “aime-je” is not correct french, a little mistake which really irked me in an otherwise almost perfect book. But because everything else was beautiful, this isn’t affecting my 5-star rating of this work.

This a heartfelt book looking at the joy of classical music the author's father had and rediscovering classical music through her journey and her father music collection. there is also abit of historical aspect to each chapter as discuss each composer listed in the book, found this very interesting as it makes classical music more likeable.

There is a certain TED-talk-coded genre, call it Wouldn't It Be Fun if I, in which the author injects himself into his subject, documenting his efforts to read an encyclopedia, follow every edict in the Bible, thank every person involved in producing his morning cup of coffee, cook all of Julia Child's recipes, and so forth. Perhaps because they teem with condescension toward their readers — shame on them for not having thought of this first, all glory be to the author for his heroic quest — their reception has generally been lukewarm.

There is a second genre, call it I Can Do It Too, in which outsiders to classical music throw themselves into that foreign world, bull in china shop, results be damned. So, you have the mentally troubled man playing Rachmaninoff's difficult third piano concerto poorly, the investment banker with no musical training conducting Mahler's second symphony also poorly, the newspaper editor publicly desecrating Chopin's first ballade.

Listen with Father lies roughly at the intersection of these two conceits. Caroline Sanderson sets her sights less on play-acting as a musician than on gaining an appreciation for classical music that her late father had, an appreciation she movingly regrets not having sought during his time on this earth. The book is divided into eight chapters, each using one musical work or set of works as jumping-off points for meditations on musical aesthetics and the guilt of the bereaved. Sanderson is most successful when she reflects on the life of her father, an intelligent, conservative English man who excelled in mathematics and chess — he nearly defeated a Russian grandmaster in his college years.

In the first chapter, on Mozart's twenty-second piano concerto, Sanderson raises the discredited "Mozart effect," which rested on a laughably inadequate study to posit that listening to classical music could juice babies' spatial reasoning for reasons unknown and resulted in governments wasting untold millions of dollars giving free but useless Smart Baby merchandise to poor families in the quixotic quest to ensure that all children were above average. If only these spendthrift lawmakers could have asked: in which direction does the arrow of causality point? Does sitting next to a speaker playing Good music transform the newborn's grey matter by some alchemical process into that of an astrophysicist or chess grandmaster? Or is it possible that winners of the intellectual genetic lottery demand more from their music than three minutes of droning about the female reproductive organ or the fifty-ninth permutation of a breakup dirge?

Pop music's appeal is broad but shallow. For all of the hundreds of millions of times a pop song will have been streamed, its useful life is short. Any individual track is soon forgotten. The nature of that sector of the music industry compels newness, moreness, and loudness. Questions of the contrasting appeals of pop and classical music have been asked for decades and satisfactory answers to them seem no nearer today. What classical music has that pop music lacks is timelessness. What gives it that feature may rightly be debated, but what cannot is that it is there.

On that subject, Sanderson's second chapter discusses several works of Igor Stravinsky. Stravinsky's weird compositions are barely approachable. He is best seen as a figurehead of the atonal revolution, one of the first to rebel against Western harmony and rhythm. Even those who are not classical-music enthusiasts know that the first performance of his Rite of Spring in Paris provoked something of a riot. Classical labels are subject to the same laws of economics as pop ones. There are comparatively few recordings of Stravinsky's works because they do not respond well to the repeat, careful listening that make Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven such pleasing experiences. So it was no surprise to me, as it was to Sanderson, that her father owned no Stravinsky recordings. Previewing the blinkered superciliousness of today's composers who have collectively abrogated their responsibility to satisfy their listeners, Stravinsky wrote that people were too stupid to understand his music.

Sanderson's father played only a bit part in this work, which often took on the likeness of a travelogue. The author, a freelance writer, took so many vacations purportedly to understand her father's music that I began to track them all: Salzburg, Paris, Gargnano, Lahti, Marseilles, Provence. Certainly nourishing a love for art is an individual process. But I found this obsession with traveling to composers' homelands to listen to their music to be too much. There is no suggestion that her father traveled to any of these places, and his appreciation for music, by all appearances, turned out fine. I suppose that the majority of people who listen mostly to classical music have not visited all or even most of these cities. It was this aspect of the book that brought to mind the two mock-genres at the beginning of this review. Recognizing the technical brilliance of Chopin's études, the peaceful sublimity of the middle movement of a Mozart concerto, the sound-baths of Sibelius symphonies, does not require airfare. It just takes listening.

Wow, just absolutely wow. This was beautifully written. The emotional gut punch was one that I wasn’t expecting to hit me quite as hard as it did. This is such a realistic, relatable story on grief, self discovery and learning to live in a world post loss, I will be recommending this to everyone I know. It gave me absolute chills.

This is a thoughtful and deeply introspective exploration of classical music. I cannot begin to describe how much I love, adore and appreciate this book. This book made me think deeply of the kind of classical music I love listening to and why.⁣
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Caroline Sanderson fell in love with the pieces by Mozart when she was four, but it wasn’t long before she started listening to what was more popular and her father didn’t manage to persuade her to listen to more classical music. It was only after he passed away that she decided to listen carefully and attentively to the music that her late father once loved.⁣
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Within this book, Sanderson writes about all of that - eight chapters in total - a piece by each composer, from Mozart, Stravinsky, Kathleen Ferrier, Brahms, Schumann, Sibelius, Chopin to Strauss. In each of the chapters, there’s the personal bit of what she experiences and what she notices, but there is also the historical context I really enjoyed reading about.⁣
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This book is Sanderson’s tribute not only to classical music, but also love and respect for her father. It’s her way of grieving. ⁣
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“Grief sits by your side on that epic, grinding, post-bereavement journey that you never wanted to go on and wish would end. Am I nearly there yet? Sometimes I think that I’ve made peace with the truth that nothing can stay the same in life, but then I find myself repeatedly battering myself against that truth. Grief for me is a dull soreness beneath the plaster I’ve stuck on it, a childhood graze on my knee which makes me wince when I knock it against something.”⁣
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This book is an incredibly touching one to read and I didn’t want it to end. Thank you to the publisher for letting me read this early.

Listen with Father is an ode to music and the connections we form through it. Using eight pieces her father loved as a starting point, Sanderson embarks on her own journey into classical music, learning to listen to them in an entirely new light. Her brief histories of the composers and their works are delicately interwoven with personal memories of her father.

I found it very relatable; my father is also a lover of classical music, but I grew up with a very different music taste and have never really been able to appreciate it. Sanderson's reflections on her chosen pieces and her honest, evolving relationship with them helped me to find a new way into the music, and I now have several pieces on rotation alongside my usual playlist of heavy metal and k-pop.

The book is also a smart and sensitive meditation on grief and the quiet, everyday acts of remembrance. Sanderson makes several references to H is for Hawk, which she read shortly after her father’s death, and her own account carries a similar sense of intimacy and grace.

Deft and heartfelt, Listen with Father is a symphony of remembrance.

For readers who listened with their fathers and got their love of classical music from them.
This is Caroline Sanderson's accounting and commentary on her experience with classical music.
Each chapter works like a personal, anecdotal essay with references to and information about classical music, and the role music plays in our loves.
Equal parts touching and sophisticated, personal and universal, this is a wonderful testament to classical music, our parents, and what connects us.
Sanderson' writing is gripping.