thea musgrave, composer

“[Glennie] approached the instruments with an intensity that cast a spell on listeners, manipulating their moods with explosive power and enchanting tenderness.”

--The Virginian Pilot

It is a measure of her talent and determination that Thea 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.

Born in Scotland on 27 May 1928, she studied first at the University of Edinburgh and later at the Conservatoire in Paris, where she spent four years as a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. In 1970 she became Guest Professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara, a position which confirmed her increasing involvement with the musical life of the United States, where she has resided since 1972. In 1974 she received the Koussevitzky Award, resulting in the composition of Space Play, and she has also been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1974-75, and again in 1982-83. In June 1995 Musgrave received a conferment of Honorary Degree of Doctor of Music from Glasgow University and earlier in 1979 one from Smith College in the United States.

Musgrave has always been eager to extend the apparent conventional boundaries of music and has consistently explored new means of projecting and maintaining essentially dramatic situations in music. As she once put it, she wanted to "explore dramatic-abstract musical forms: that is, dramatic in the sense of presentation, but at the same time abstract because there is no programmatic content...a kind of extension of the concerto principle." She has always been acutely aware of spatial acoustic possibilities: in the Clarinet Concerto the soloist moves around the different sections of the orchestra and in the Horn Concerto the orchestral horns are stationed around the concert hall. Thus the players are not merely an apparatus for the projection of the music, but are also its dramatis personae. It is not surprising that such a concern with music's dramatic potential should have led to Musgrave's considerable contribution to opera, and it is interesting to see that her large-scale operas of the last 20 years, beginning with The Voice of Ariadne (1973) and Mary, Queen of Scots (1977) are in every sense the true successors to the instrumental concertos.

Indeed, both in her theatrical and non-theatrical works, Musgrave has continued to explore new means of projecting and maintaining essentially dramatic situations in music. The remarkable and witty Space Play (1974) is both a lineal successor to her earlier chamber concertos (Chamber Concerto No. 2 and No. 3) and a diverting 'comedy of reactions' (both musical and visual) involving the talents and ingenuities of every member of its conductorless ensemble. On a smaller scale, this is true of the clarinet trio Pierrot. In her radio opera An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1981), singers and orchestra are alike enwrapped in – and in dialogue with – an almost continuous taped ambience and commentary made up of natural and not-so-natural sounds, which powerfully enhances the dream-like atmosphere of the work as a whole.

As this last example suggests, in recent years Musgrave has been exploring the resources of electronic instruments and sound-enhancing techniques to extend her palette and enlarge her theatre of the imagination. Electronics are also an important means of 'multiplying' a solo instrument so that it clones into two or more characters. Electronic tape, already important in From One to Another and Orfeo, plays an essential role in Golden Echo I for horn and Niobe for oboe, while a digital delay system performs a similar role in Narcissus for flute or for clarinet. As some of these titles indicate, the archetypal power of myth remains important for Musgrave, and indeed the most recent premiere in January 2000 was Lamenting with Ariadne given by the Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

Similarly her operas have tended to focus on historic figures whose lives took on an epic or archetypal dimension. This tendency seems to reach its climax in her treatment of the heroic but profoundly ambiguous liberator of six countries of South America: the opera Simón Bolívar, her most important work of the last decade. While it confirms Musgrave's special ability, very rare in the present time, to give flesh and conviction to the perennially full-blooded emotions and characters of grand opera, Simón Bolívar may also mark, in its romanticism and touches of Hispanic exoticism, the furthest she is prepared to go in rapprochement with traditional dramatic concepts.

It is perhaps, significant that since the completion of this opera, Musgrave has returned to her favourite 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.

Other recent premieres include: Songs for a Winter's Evening, for Soprano and orchestra, based on the poems of Robert Burns: Threnody for clarinet and piano, Piccolo Play, for piccolo and piano, Postcards from Spain, for guitar solo: Phoenix Rising for the BBC Symphony Orchestra which was premiered at the Royal Festival Hall in February 1998 and which had its North American premiere in November 1999 with the Boston Symphony. In January 1999, Three Women – Queen, Slave, Mistress was premiered by the Women's Philharmonic in San Francisco, and Celebration Day for chorus and orchestra was premiered in December 1999.

New recordings include a Cala recording featuring: Clarinet Concerto, Autumn Sonata and The Seasons, with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Thea Musgrave with Victoria Soames, clarinet and a 1998 release on Collins Classics with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra with Nicholas Kraemer performing The Seasons, Helios, and Night Music.

Other works include: Aurora for string orchestra, Beauty and the Beast, a full length ballet, Concerto for Orchestra, Memento vitae for orchestra, Monologues of Mary, Queen of Scots, for soprano and orchestra, Obliques for orchestra, Peripeteia for orchestra, Rainbow for orchestra, Ring out Wild Bells for clarinet, violin, cello and piano, Song of the Enchanter for orchestra, Triptych for tenor and orchestra, Viola Concerto.