Musgrave Concerto for Orchestra, Concertos for Clarinet, and Horn

Scottish-born but US-resident,Thea Musgrave has composed in almost every genre yet has managed to conduct her creative career with remarkable singleness of purpose – and with highly varied and wholly fruitful results that have been greeted with success, and indeed affection, by audiences on both sides of the Atlantic. She studied at Edinburgh University with Hans Gál as one of her teachers and by 1970 Musgrave was Guest Professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara, and since 1972 she has resided in the U.S.A., holding a number of prestigious teaching positions.

Like many composers of her generation in Britain – the generation that first began to attract notice in the middle 1950s – Thea Musgrave came of age musically in that ‘rite of passage’ which involved acknowledging the primary importance of Bartók and the Second Viennese School, and thus the rejection of tonality as traditionally conceived, along with its traditional expressive and form-building functions. Musgrave’s whole artistic progress to a greater degree than most of her contemporaries – was the need to discover new means of dramatizing the structure and musical argument of each work.