Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Thea Musgrave
at 75

Scottish-born composer Thea Musgrave will her 75th birthday on Tuesday. Harold Rosenbaum and the New York Virtuoso Singers will pay tribute in a concert of her choral works next Saturday night at 8 p.m. at St. Peter’s Church, 619 Lexington Avenue, entrance on 54th Street. Among the scheduled pieces are Notes on the Underground; For the Time Being; Advent; Black Tambourine; and John Cook.

“I decided to honor Thea Musgrave on her 75th birthday because all of her many choral works I have come across are strikingly beautiful, extremely well crafted and meaningful,” says Rosenbaum. “Her choral music, more than any other late 20th-century British composer’s, reminds me of that of Benjamin Britten’s. Both composers’ music consistently demonstrates an originality and purpose, with expressivity combined with total mastery of compositional technique.” This program will be recorded for a future release on Bridge Records.

It is a measure of her talent and determination that Musgrave achieved great respect for her work both as a composer and conductor at a time when it was still a rather uncommon profession for a woman. The joint commission of Harriet, the Woman called Moses (1985) by the Royal Opera House and Virginia Opera Association and, most recently, Simón Bolívar by the Los Angeles Music Center Opera and Scottish Opera can be seen as confirmation of a widespread recognition.
Musgrave was born in Edinburgh and studied at the university there between 1947 and 1950. She was also a pupil of Hans Gál, the Austrian-born composer who lived in Scotland, and subsequently studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris until 1954. During her student years she was awarded the Donald Francis Tovey Prize and the Lili Boulanger Memorial Prize. After teaching at London University (1958-65), she held a variety of lecturing posts at British and American universities, including a period as visiting professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara in 1970. In 1987 she became a lecturer at Queen's University, New York City. She has also served on the music panel of the Arts Council of Great Britain and the executive committee of the Composers' Guild.
Musgrave's early works include the specially commissioned Cantata for a Summer's Day (1954), the ballet A Tale of Thieves (1953), and the chamber opera The Abbot of Drimrock (1955). She has also written full-scale operas, including The Decision (1964); The Voice of Ariadne (1973), commissioned for the 1974 Aldeburgh Festival; Mary, Queen of Scots (1976); A Christmas Carol (1979), for which she herself adapted Dickens's novel as the libretto; and Harriet, the Woman Called Moses (1985), based on the life of Harriet Tubman. She also wrote concertos for clarinet (1967), for horn (1971), and for viola (1973), as well as chamber music and such instrumental pieces as Space Play (1974), for wind quintet and string quartet. Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1981) is a half-hour radio opera. In 1984 she collaborated with Richard Rodney Bennett on Moving into Aquarius, a piece written as a tribute to Michael Tippett on his 80th birthday. Her later orchestral works include The Seasons (1988) and Rainbow (1990).

Since the completion of Simon Bolivar, , Musgrave has returned to her favorite concertante forms for the first time in over a decade: three concertos in little more than a year, and two of them for unusual instruments — the Autumn Sonata for bass clarinet and Journey through a Japanese Landscape for marimba with wind orchestra. As drama recedes again from the specifities of words, it summons up resonances that are all the more profound. Titles give hints of an enhanced concern with landscape, times of day, above all the passing of the seasons and history: Autumn Sonata follows Wild Winter, a kind of caprice on the Renaissance fantasy for voices and viols, and is followed in turn by A Medieval Summer, third part of the extended and extending madrigal-book for voices collectively entitled On the Underground. The oboe concerto Helios meanwhile stares at the Northern sun, the daily miracle of its rise. In her full maturity, Thea Musgrave seems in her music to be reflecting increasingly on the cycle of seasons which is the ultimate symbol of perpetual renewal in art as in life.

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