When my dad died suddenly, the piece left behind on his music stand was ‘Rumores de la caleta’ by the Spanish composer Isaac Albéniz. My dad was a jazz and classical guitarist, and it’s an arrangement of a flamenco-inspired piano piece from a set of works that mostly refer to specific places in Spain, Recuerdos de viaje (‘Memories of a Journey’), composed between 1886 and 1887. As Albéniz wrote Recuerdos, he almost certainly didn’t mean to leave behind a scavenger hunt around Andalusia for a 35-year-old grieving British woman, but you don’t get to choose what your legacy will be.

La Caleta is a famous beach in Cádiz, on the south-western most tip of Andalusia. There I was, cross-legged on the sand in the long early morning shadows of a world barely awake. I had my phone in my backpack, and on it, a Spotify playlist: ‘Dad guitar music’, including the strummed gesture and tricky triplets of ‘Rumores de la caleta’. I’d made the playlist after he’d died, trying to remember everything I could when nothing had been written down. How do you remember what they loved, everything they have been? So much had disappeared in an instant. It was now four years since his death, and I was apprehensive: I wanted to see what it might mean to me to listen to this music on the same beach Albéniz had written it about. I wasn’t really sure why I was doing it, but it made some sort of sense.

It had taken me a long time to return to my dad’s music. I’m a musicologist, and before that, I trained as a trombone player. After he died, I found I couldn’t listen to music. Not just the music I closely associated with my dad: all music. As I ran laps of the local park – a brief intermission in all the television-watching I was doing to distract myself from the horror – I sought out voices. Music was too much, grating over my raw nerves and tender skin. It told me what to feel. And I didn’t feel whatever it was it seemed I was supposed to: I was angry and hollow.

But the music my dad loved and played – Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Heitor Villa Lobos, Albéniz – was a special category of impossible.

About two years after he died, I was at our family home and the urge came over me to return to his music stand. It was one of many unthinkable things that had been left when we came back from the hospital after he had died without warning – pancreatitis that became sepsis – to find the house exactly as he had left it, his coat slung over the back of a chair, all the tabs open on his laptop, his shoes haphazard by the back door.

The music stand was an archive of everything he had been playing in the weeks when we didn’t know he was going to die. A window on to something private: my father’s music practice. Cascading classical arpeggios, noodling over a jazz chord sequence he’d prerecorded on a blank cassette: this had been the wallpaper to my childhood. And the stand’s messy disorder of sheet music, new music layered on top of the old, was typical of my dad, who would absentmindedly leave banana skins on top of laptops; who, if he found his new shoes were rubbing, would take them off and walk around barefoot – problem solved – no matter that he was in a major American museum near the White House, where it turns out an armed guard polices whether or not people are wearing their shoes.

Right at the front was Albéniz’s ‘Rumores de la caleta’. Behind it: Bach, Handel, Astor Piazzolla. And another piece by Albéniz: ‘Sevilla’ (from the Suite Española No 1): maybe that explained Dad’s text the week before he died, proposing a family holiday in Seville (‘I’m half-way to enticing Mum’).

I took photos of his music and labelled the images in neat folders on my laptop, like I do when I’m on an academic research trip. Reassembling the music, hiding my sadness within the safety of long-honed professional skills. I played some recordings of ‘Rumores de la caleta’. The whirligig confidence of Scottish guitarist David Russell. The clipped phrasing of Narciso Yepes. But listening to these recordings only gave me the outline of his presence. They weren’t my dad playing. As I began to listen, I could maybe hear him through, or behind their physicality and immediacy – but memories are fragile. I began to fear I would lose my ability to conjure him, that I might obliterate my memories with the weight and repetition of a recording.

I followed the historical trail of these pieces. At London’s British Library I ordered up books about Albéniz, trying to find his trace, an effort to at least get closer to someone or something, if I couldn’t get closer to my dad. I learned that it’s hard to separate the fact from the fiction in Albéniz’s biography. He was a concert pianist and composer, most celebrated for his suite Iberia (1905-1909), and a man well acquainted with self-mythologisation, supposedly having smuggled himself to America to do a concert tour as a child (he hadn’t); making a Faustian pact with a patron in later life (again, untrue). Just before he wrote ‘Rumores de la caleta’, he and his wife, Rosina Jordana, had lost their eldest child, Blanca, nearly two. She died of a fever, and I wondered what it meant that he’d been bouncing around the concert circuit, visiting southern Spain in the months after her death. Travel is an attempt to escape; the tragedy is how you’ll always find yourself there waiting at your destination. And here I was, surrounded by books, swinging high and weightless, a trapeze artist of the intellect holding tightly to academic method. What I needed was to fall. To let go, to allow vulnerability. To let music help me feel.

It was another two years before I took a trip to Spain, finally ready, armed with a vague idea about recreating the holiday my dad and I had half-planned. I’d written to Lola, a musicologist friend who worked in Seville, to see if I could stay with her, and whether she could tell me about La Caleta. ‘Of course I know La Caleta’, she replied. ‘It’s in Cádiz. It’s where we go when we get too hot in Seville.’ She would book us an apartment.

Hot was an understatement. I touched down in Seville to the sort of 42-degree day on which local television reporters fry an egg on the burning street. We drove to Cádiz, and early the next morning, I visited the beach, La Caleta. Against the crashing of the waves, I listened to the music that had been on my dad’s stand.

I don’t know what I wanted the music to do, exactly – but what happened certainly wasn’t it. I felt nothing, and I felt cheated. I’d come all this way, made this big gesture, but the music felt wrong; kitschy flamenco dancers summoned to the beach. A sense of distance: Albéniz, a man from northern Spain, disguising his feelings by cloaking them in the folklore of the south. Once again on the pathway of loss, it seemed that my relationship with music wasn’t at all what I imagined it would be.

To top it all, I then discovered that I was actually at the wrong beach. I’d committed the cardinal research sin: Never Trust Wikipedia Alone. Albéniz’s was a different La Caleta, apparently in Malaga.

On my final evening back in Seville we visited the cathedral, dutifully checking off the main tourist sights. It came out of nowhere when it happened; this wasn’t where I’d expected to be unearthed. A guitarist in the corner of an alley around the corner. Solo, playing music that wasn’t quite what my dad had played. But also: it was. It was what undid everything. Quietly. Not an early morning on a beach far from any crowds, but an evening immersed in the heady thrum of tourism. The company of my friends and a lone guitar. Plucked strings, high walls, the dark stones of sundown. It felt like magic, as the anticipation of the night to come hummed in the hot air. That was what it took. We were creating a new world together that wasn’t quite the old one, and both Albéniz and my dad had led me there, and I was devastated and I was hopeful and I felt loved.

Because music is about finding your people, and making life together, about being and living. Sometimes that’s about playing in an ensemble or singing together. Sometimes it’s about play-dancing flamenco as you splash in the sea with your dog and your friends. You’re always recalling the past and bringing it with you into the future you forge with new experiences, new music, ever-changing relationships. Because that’s what life is. Change. And what I’ve begun to learn is that that’s ok.

Emily MacGregor’s While the Music Lasts: A Memoir of Music, Grief and Joy is available from September publishing and will be reviewed in the August issue of Gramophone. Find out more: septemberpublishing.org