Thea Musgrave

Thea Musgrave

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Thea Musgrave began her studies in Edinburgh and in 1950 went to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger. While still at the Paris Conservatoire, her music began attracting attention in her native Scotland. By the mid-sixties she was a much-respected and widely-commissioned composer in the UK, conducting many of her own works. In 1971, Musgrave married the violist and conductor Peter Mark and emigrated to the US with her husband later that year. They moved to Virginia in 1975 where Mark was invited to set up the Virginia Opera. From there her career as an opera composer took off, and in 1977 Scottish Opera premiered her watershed grand opera Mary, Queen of Scots. During the late sixties-early seventies, Musgrave began working on group of works which sought to elevate the inherent drama of the concerto form, extending the conventional boundaries of instrumental performance by making the drama of the music explicit, and often directing players in their physical movement around the performance space to interact with other players, sometimes independent of the conductor – this genre referred to by the composer as being examples of ‘dramatic-abstract’ or ‘dramatic-programmatic’ music. With over 160 mature works to date for choir, orchestra, chamber ensemble and the stage, Musgrave is highly respected voice in composition, having been commissioned by some of the world’s finest performing organisations such as the Royal Opera House, the BBC Orchestras and Choirs, and the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Musgrave has been the recipient of many honorary doctorates and notable awards, including two Guggenheim Fellowships, the Ivors Classical Music Award 2018, and The Queen’s Medal for Music. She was awarded a CBE on the Queen’s New Year’s Honour List in 2002. (Image © Kate Mount)

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