Musgrave marks lifetime in music
TMusic HEA Musgrave – Scottish composer, conductor, pianist and teacher who turned 90 last month – thrusts a glass of wine into my hand. She’s teaching me “la langue verte”: juicy phrases she learned in France in the 1940s. “Merde a la treizième” is her favourite, she grins. “Can you print that?!”
There is cause for celebration. The day before we meet, Musgrave was given an Ivor Novello Award alongside Billy Bragg, Lionel Richie and Shane Macgowan. The day after, she’s off to Buckingham Palace to receive The Queen’s Medal for Music. Around the world her 90th birthday is being marked by orchestras and ensembles – including a portrait concert in
Glasgow with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra this week. “They got me started,” she says. “They gave me my chance when I came back from Paris in the 1950s. And you know who was assistant conductor? Colin
Davis!”
Musgrave was born in Edinburgh on May 27, 1928. She studied at the University of Edinburgh, where she was inspired by the legacy of Donald Francis Tovey and his belief that meaning in music comes from the music itself: that there’s plenty drama in the way notes relate to each other without grafting on external narrative. After graduating, she trod the path of many brave 20th century composers to study at the Paris Conservatoire with Nadia Boulanger, whose fastidious ear and fierce attention to craft founded in Musgrave a lifelong propensity for clarity and discipline. She spent four years in the French capital, during which time she began to turn heads back home with her student works. In 1954, she returned to Edinburgh for a composing apprenticeship, and many of her early orchestral pieces – Obliques (1958), the Scottish Dance Suite (1959) – were premiered by the BBC SSO.
She talks about that period in animated detail. She tells me stories about her conductor friends Colin [Davis], Alex [Alexander Gibson], Norman [del Mar: apparently he would go through his record collection daily, listening to a different record in entirety every morning while he shaved]. She recalls the first
Edinburgh International Festival in 1947. “We had rationing. We had trams all the way up the Mound. All along the tram lines there were posts holding up the cables, and on every post was a bouquet of flowers. It was so beautiful. It was like light shining in the gloom.”
Eventually the London music scene seduced her south. “At that point one needed to be in London,” she says, “because that’s where big things were happening. Now I don’t think that’s so true.” If Scotland had been then as it is now – might she have stayed? “Yes, quite possibly.” In the end she didn’t stay in London, either. In the 1970s, she took up a guest professorship in California, where she was commissioned to write a piece for the finest viola player on the faculty. His name was Peter Mark; the two married the next year, and when Mark was asked to set up an opera company in Virginia, Musgrave went with him. They’ve lived in the USA ever since.
It’s clear Musgrave thrived in the company of composers she got to know in London in the 1960s. “I knew Richard [Rodney Bennett]; I knew Max [Peter Maxwell Davies]; I knew Sandy [Alexander Goehr]. I knew Lizzy [Elizabeth Lutyens] and Betty [Elizabeth Maconchy].” She shows me a photo: her and Aaron Copland at the Aldeburgh Festival. She shows me another: her and Maxwell Davies, Rodney Bennett and Malcolm Williamson in a tearoom. They year is 1965. The air looks thick with cigarette smoke, the group deep in conversation.
Would she discuss her own music? Only with Rodney Bennett, she says. “When I’m writing something, the energy has to go into writing, not discussing – until it’s finished. Then I bore everybody! You can’t wait for approval. You shouldn’t be a composer