Music is an art of time: songs play to a rhythm, giving shape to the seconds as they pass, charging the present with a pulse we can feel. But as music takes us forward through time it also takes us back – to the moment of its composition or recording; to a particularly resonant time in our own past; and yet further, summoning the echoes of older music contained within a song. In new books by David Remnick and Michel Faber we get two different approaches to writing about something ephemeral yet emotionally adhesive. One of them made time fly, and one of them made time slow until the only beat I could hear was the sound of my own head against the desk.

In Holding the Note, Remnick, a Pulitzer Prize-winner and long-serving editor of the New Yorker, collects 11 of his essays on the greats of 20th- and 21st-century music, from Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen to Aretha Franklin and Mavis Staples. The majority of Remnick’s subjects were in their seventies or eighties at the time of initial publication. Most are now either dead or heading the queue for the last great gig in the sky.

In that sense, the essays read like advance elegies: loving, expansive, taking in the full sweep of each artist’s life, stitching together the voices of the subjects and those that have known them best. They are also elegies for the traditions these artists built on, and a sense of time passing binds the essays. There is Buddy Guy literally fretting away, fearing he’s ‘the last bluesman’; Pavarotti burdened as ‘the last great tenor’; and Lawrence Lucie, aged 99 and the last person alive to have played with Duke Ellington at the Cotton Club, now playing standards at ‘a coal-oven-pizza joint’ in New York.

If this sounds heavy work, Remnick carries it off with a light touch. His prose is effortlessly readable and peppered with whip-shot oneliners. The 62-year-old Bruce Springsteen’s stage performance is ‘as close as a white man of social security age can get to James Brown circa 1962 without risking a herniated disk’; Keith Richards ‘lives like a private-equity pirate’.

Remnick’s high note is saved for the least heralded of his subjects. For nearly 30 years, Phil Schaap hosted a Columbia University radio show dedicated to Charlie Parker. The son of bohemians and part-raised by the stars of the Big Band era, Schaap was the ‘Mr Memory of Jazz’, a last link. His show was a cross between a Ritalin-fuelled close-reading class and a wild conversational solo that left listeners both ‘weirdly fascinated’ and ready to call Schaap an ambulance. Remnick’s portrait is sensitive and soulful. Schaap sounds like ‘a mad Talmudic scholar’, arcane and fervent. He painstakingly restored the ‘lost’ Bendetti recordings, jazz’s Holy Grail, thereby expanding the Parker live canon by a third. And here he is years later, still tending the flame alone, surrounded by thousands of records and a culture that cares less and less.

Schaap is a quasi-religious figure, and religion provides the rhythm by which many of these artists lived, from the Gospel journeys of Franklin and Staples to the late-life monasticism of Cohen. Even for those less obviously ascetic characters like Keith Richards, the language of grace infuses creation: ‘If you’re working the right chord you can hear this other chord going on behind it, which actually you’re not playing. It’s there. It defies logic.’ Music speaks to what we know but do not understand. One way to talk about music, then, is to talk about God.

Another way to talk about it is like an Alan Partridge tribute act. This is the route preferred by the novelist Michel Faber in Listen, which looks not at what we listen to, but how and why. Faber argues that ‘the musical tastes which seem to us so instinctive and hardwired are, in fact, the products of enculturation’, enlisting sociology, biology, audiology, chats with his friends and YouTube comments as evidence. The book doesn’t develop an argument so much as approach it from different angles, in the way a drunk might approach a lock with a key.

The broad sociological approach yields interesting generalisations but only takes us so far, never quite explaining the stubborn singularity of life. How, for example, two scrawny, middle-class white boys in 1950s Dartford could hear Howlin’ Wolf sing the bruised sounds of the Mississippi delta and yet still feel their souls ring in harmony. Was that the result of ‘enculturation’? Plenty of others lived in that same environment, but there was only one Mick Jagger and one Keith Richards. Something is happening here, and it’s more interesting than ‘cultural appropriation’ or ‘hyper capitalism’.

A bigger issue than Faber’s argument is how he makes it. Written in the second person, a typical early passage tells one:

You are a confident reader – confident enough to tackle a substantial book that’s not a rehash of stuff you know already… Most people find reading quite arduous, hence the simplified prose in the Daily Mail or Take a Break… You’re already exceptional.

Self-awareness is not a strong suit. Music journalists are mocked for a keenness ‘to demonstrate how much hipper they are than the person in the street’ – but a paragraph later Faber is telling us how the Beatles’ White Album wasn’t really his thing, but hey, have you heard Locust Abortion Technician by the Butthole Surfers?

Early on we are promised that ‘you’ll learn a lot, but it won’t be the sort of information you usually learn when you read music books’. Things I learnt included that ‘music is a commodity’, ‘many CDs are bought for one or two songs’, and that (paging Taylor Swift fans) ‘women are less apt to get excited by an exhaustive discography’. I also learnt that classical music is ‘haughtily, complacently racist’ and that most people won’t read Listen because they ‘don’t have the luxury of meditating upon elegant sounds’: Beethoven and Joni Mitchell are just that bit too sophisticated for ordinary folk. I can think of other reasons they might not read Listen. There are, after all, better ways to write about music and better ways to play out your time.