How do we tackle the enduring prejudice against the very idea of old age, resulting in the habitual marginalisation and disparagement of the elderly by people of all ages, including old people themselves? It remains a challenge, especially knowing that women have always been aged by culture, and frequently discarded in their public and personal lives, far faster than men. However, in this wide-ranging collection the diverse authors help us to subvert the troubling ties between ageism and sexism, showing how we can instead deliver far more complex narratives of the ageing lives and experiences of all old people.

How does musicology articulate the value of music and the study of music? This is an urgent question given the collapse of music provision in schools and its impact on the discipline at university level. One response has been to demonstrate the pro-social benefits of music through empirical work allied with approaches in psychology and sociology. While this is important, we should be wary of downplaying the aesthetic value of music at the expense of more obviously instrumental functions. A recent convergence of disciplinary interest in aesthetics, from neuroscience to political theory, suggests the aesthetic dimension of music, far from being some outdated fiction, remains a powerful challenge to habitual academic discourse. Against the trivialisation of music on the one hand, and the reductive readings of critical orthodoxies on the other, I argue that music affords modes of sense-making that have never been more needed. (This article is published in the thematic collection `The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)