What do you think?
Rate this book
Listen With Father: How I Learned to Love Classical Music
Listen with Father is a book about the transformative power of listening, and about how we remember those we have loved and lost.
At four years old, Caroline Sanderson fell in love with the music of Mozart after listening to it with her father. At eight, she fell even harder for the songs of David Bowie. Her dad made many gentle attempts to persuade her to back to his world of classical music, but it wasn’t until after he died that she returned to it, in memory of him. Listen with Father tells of how she set out to listen, with great care and attention, to the music her dad loved, to work out why he so appreciated it and whether she could too.
In a beguiling blend of memoir and biography, Sanderson explores the music of composers from Igor Stravinsky to Clara Schumann and Frédéric Chopin, hearing Mozart recitals in Salzburg, visiting Sibelius’s house near Helsinki and playing Robert Schumann at home on the piano. Beautifully touching and absorbing, Listen with Father is a story of a beloved father, told through the classical music he cherished.
At four years old, Caroline Sanderson fell in love with the music of Mozart after listening to it with her father. At eight, she fell even harder for the songs of David Bowie. Her dad made many gentle attempts to persuade her to back to his world of classical music, but it wasn’t until after he died that she returned to it, in memory of him. Listen with Father tells of how she set out to listen, with great care and attention, to the music her dad loved, to work out why he so appreciated it and whether she could too.
In a beguiling blend of memoir and biography, Sanderson explores the music of composers from Igor Stravinsky to Clara Schumann and Frédéric Chopin, hearing Mozart recitals in Salzburg, visiting Sibelius’s house near Helsinki and playing Robert Schumann at home on the piano. Beautifully touching and absorbing, Listen with Father is a story of a beloved father, told through the classical music he cherished.
- GenresMemoir
400 pages, Paperback
Published October 7, 2025
2 people are currently reading
40 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
April 25, 2025
thanks to the publishers and netgalley for a free copy in return for an open and honest review.
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.
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.
May 3, 2025
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.
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.
April 20, 2025
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 mission — 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.
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.
June 24, 2025
Many thanks to the author, Caroline Sanderson, @netgalley, and the publishers, Boundless Publishing Group Ltd, for an ARC of this book, which is published in the UK on 3 July 2025.
The author’s father was a devotee of classical music, who encouraged his daughter to listen to it. She enjoyed it when she was young, but after she discovered rock ‘n’ roll, she stopped listening to music with her dad. As an adult, he would regularly buy her CDs that he thought she would like, but she never found the time to listen to them. Some years after his death, as a tribute to her father and a way to be closer to him, she decides to immerse herself in the music he loved.
Thus, Caroline listens to a range of classical music, chosen because she remembers listening to it with her father in childhood, or because she knew he like the piece. She writes about her initial experiences of listening to the music, what she makes of it, gives a brief biography of the composer, and she often attends a concert or festival to learn more (so, for example, she goes to Salzburg in search of Mozart, and to a Sibelius festival at his house in Finland).
While it is well-written, I’m in two minds about this book. That indecision reflects the tension she experiences between listening to the music and having an emotional reaction to it, and listening to the music and analysing it from a technical point of view. As an example of the analytical writing in the book, when she looks at Stravinsky, she talks about how he pitches the 7-note diatonic scale against the 12-note chromatic scale and forces “contrasting sound systems into battle...the effect is deliberately discordant.” I find that more useful and effective than reading that the writer was moved to tears by the intensity of the sound at a concert. However, I think the author’s preference is towards the first mode of experience.
Having said that, I will still consider buying this book as I did find it an interesting introduction to some composers I’ve never really listened to. And it’s a lovely tribute to her father, painting the picture of a gentle, curious, open-minded and intelligent man who was deeply loved.
The author’s father was a devotee of classical music, who encouraged his daughter to listen to it. She enjoyed it when she was young, but after she discovered rock ‘n’ roll, she stopped listening to music with her dad. As an adult, he would regularly buy her CDs that he thought she would like, but she never found the time to listen to them. Some years after his death, as a tribute to her father and a way to be closer to him, she decides to immerse herself in the music he loved.
Thus, Caroline listens to a range of classical music, chosen because she remembers listening to it with her father in childhood, or because she knew he like the piece. She writes about her initial experiences of listening to the music, what she makes of it, gives a brief biography of the composer, and she often attends a concert or festival to learn more (so, for example, she goes to Salzburg in search of Mozart, and to a Sibelius festival at his house in Finland).
While it is well-written, I’m in two minds about this book. That indecision reflects the tension she experiences between listening to the music and having an emotional reaction to it, and listening to the music and analysing it from a technical point of view. As an example of the analytical writing in the book, when she looks at Stravinsky, she talks about how he pitches the 7-note diatonic scale against the 12-note chromatic scale and forces “contrasting sound systems into battle...the effect is deliberately discordant.” I find that more useful and effective than reading that the writer was moved to tears by the intensity of the sound at a concert. However, I think the author’s preference is towards the first mode of experience.
Having said that, I will still consider buying this book as I did find it an interesting introduction to some composers I’ve never really listened to. And it’s a lovely tribute to her father, painting the picture of a gentle, curious, open-minded and intelligent man who was deeply loved.
April 6, 2025
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.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
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.
*Thank you to Netgalley for the arc in exchange for an honest review*
October 22, 2025
Caroline Sanderson’s Listen with Father is a graceful, emotionally resonant memoir that weaves love, loss, and music into a deeply human symphony. With tender precision, Sanderson recounts her journey back to classical music the shared language she once spoke with her late father transforming each note and composer into a meditation on memory, grief, and connection.
Her storytelling is both intimate and erudite, moving seamlessly between personal reflection and cultural exploration. Whether she’s tracing the elegance of Mozart in Salzburg or rediscovering the melancholy of Schumann at home, Sanderson writes with a lyricism that mirrors the music she reveres. This book is a reminder that listening to music, to our memories, to those we’ve lost can be one of the most powerful acts of love.
Listen with Father is not just a memoir; it’s an elegy in motion, a masterpiece of remembrance and renewal that will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt music speak where words fall short.
Her storytelling is both intimate and erudite, moving seamlessly between personal reflection and cultural exploration. Whether she’s tracing the elegance of Mozart in Salzburg or rediscovering the melancholy of Schumann at home, Sanderson writes with a lyricism that mirrors the music she reveres. This book is a reminder that listening to music, to our memories, to those we’ve lost can be one of the most powerful acts of love.
Listen with Father is not just a memoir; it’s an elegy in motion, a masterpiece of remembrance and renewal that will resonate with anyone who’s ever felt music speak where words fall short.
June 26, 2025
Thank you to NetGalley for providing me with an advanced copy of this book!
As a fan of classical music and my dad's biggest admirer, I truly enjoyed immersing myself in this heartfelt story about a girl and her father. Although she never quite understood her dad's passion for classical music, she didn't give it a fair chance while he was alive. After his passing, she turns to the music he cherished to feel a connection to him.
Although I already love classical music, I learned new and interesting facts about some of the composers throughout the chapters. I must admit, I shed a few tears while reading this book, as it prompted me to reflect on my own relationship with my dad.
As a fan of classical music and my dad's biggest admirer, I truly enjoyed immersing myself in this heartfelt story about a girl and her father. Although she never quite understood her dad's passion for classical music, she didn't give it a fair chance while he was alive. After his passing, she turns to the music he cherished to feel a connection to him.
Although I already love classical music, I learned new and interesting facts about some of the composers throughout the chapters. I must admit, I shed a few tears while reading this book, as it prompted me to reflect on my own relationship with my dad.
September 1, 2025
As engaging varied and lyrical as the music it describes, Caroline Sanderson‘s listen with father is, by turns, touching, observant And funny.
Like most grief narratives, this is the story of a journey from despair to acceptance. Sanderson is an able guide on the way and leads us through its stages while avoiding the pitfall of sentimentality. The subtlety, precision and depth of her writing, as well as the music it describes, seem to take us back to a less superficial time. Perhaps that is the role of books now; if so, it is a noble one.
Highly recommended.
Like most grief narratives, this is the story of a journey from despair to acceptance. Sanderson is an able guide on the way and leads us through its stages while avoiding the pitfall of sentimentality. The subtlety, precision and depth of her writing, as well as the music it describes, seem to take us back to a less superficial time. Perhaps that is the role of books now; if so, it is a noble one.
Highly recommended.
December 9, 2025
Sort of book i enjoyed as a diffrent direction but the next one was way better as a novel with more in depth discussion on music
April 27, 2025
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. It gave me absolute chills.
January 17, 2026
I loved this. Having initially believed that it would allow me to chew on a(nother) perspective on listening to music, Sanderson's grieving but joyous narrative actually revealed more than anything a love of family and a desire to share. She had, unwittingly, received the priceless gift of music's lexicon from her father - who seems a super man - and she allows the reader to journey with her as she, herself, negotiates parenthood and life's new chapters. We benefit, therefore, from her research and fascination with not only seminal composers of classical music but relationships, aging and memories: the narrative is articulate and intimate; the tone both explorative and reflective. Great little references, too, to 70's family holidays, the 80's restless music scene and maturing in the Cotswolds which, for me, kept it very real. Occasionally, we might have lost sight of the music amidst her emotional reflecting but in many respects that is understandable for I suspect the very penning of the text proved most cathartic. I have recommended the book on a number of occasions and will now look to the subjects of Austen or Adele for similarly engaging and comforting texts...!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews