As she turns 90
if that’s why you’re doing it. Your passion can’t depend on accolades. ” Where does that passion come from? “Oh, you’re born with it, and hopefully you get to cultivate it, if it’s not squished by your parents, misfortune, or war. There is luck involved.”
Musgrave has never been interested in talking about gender issues. Were there any other women composers studying at Edinburgh University in the late 1940s? “I don’t remember.” Did she mind the profession being overwhelmingly male? “I didn’t really notice.” She shows me a programme for her New York 90th birthday concert, which features a quote: “I am a woman and I am a composer, but rarely at the same time.” What did she mean by that? “I mean that when you’re writing music, you’re a human being. Men have the same passions. They love, they hate. They lose something, they gain something. Don’t tell me men don’t have the same feelings.”
“Of course,” she adds, “woman of my age had to bring up the kids. I never wanted to have kids because I didn’t want to spend my life changing nappies and going to baseball games. But I think that’s a generational thing. In my time, it was us woman who had to make all the changes.”
In a career spanning 60 years and counting, Musgrave has written compelling and compassionate music full of the innate drama of human behaviour. She’s a composer who recognises that music can mirror life, that music can shape the way we live, that the emotional and even physical makeup of musicians is integral to the impact of any performance. Her operas are gripping: unflinching portrayals of three-dimensional characters who seem to breathe and feel and mess up like the rest of us.
Even her instrumental music is dramatic. In the once-notorious clarinet concerto (1968), she uses the soloist as a troublemaker, roaming through the orchestra, rallying groups of musicians then wandering off to form rival allegiances elsewhere. In the Horn Concerto (1971), offstage orchestral horns surround the audience and answer the soloist in flippant voices. They stage noisy coups. They distort. At the premiere, one critic asked, “Do they have to lock the doors to stop people leaving at the sound of this contemporary music?” The soloist Barry Tuckwell replied, “There’s a horn player at every exit so no one can leave!”
Likewise, Musgrave’s company is riotous. She laughs constantly, and her memory is an encyclopaedia of the past half century of British and American classical music gossip. But behind all that there is fearsome discipline. She says she needs friends to socialise, she needs musicians to play her music – “I mine them shamelessly for information!” – but when writing, her focus is absolute.
She tells me a final story. This one is about a student who arrived for a lesson and apologised for not having done enough work that week. “Something to do with her boyfriend,” Musgrave rolls her eyes, “so I sat her down and I said listen: I don’t care what boyfriend or girlfriend you have, but if you’re serious about being a composer, your assignment for next week is to buy a copy of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own and to read it. Then you say to your boyfriend, I absolutely adore you, but my teacher is very fierce. And my teacher says I have to go into my room alone, and I have to compose.”
Thea Musgrave’s 90th birthday concert with the BBC SSO is at City Halls, Glasgow, on Friday