Ken Walton

Commposer Thea Musgrave tells how Turner’s landscapes, Edwin Morgan’s poetry and her own dreams have inspired her work

It takes only a few seconds of lively conversation with veteran Scots-born composer Thea Musgrave to realise that, at the age of 90, she has the mental energy of someone 50 years her junior, a sense of humour raucously amplified by indefatigable laughter, and a friendly but firm demeanour that has clearly enabled her to get on so well and for so long in a profession that was once notoriously tough for women.

When we speak, she is in her New York home and far too hot, so being cooled by a whirring army of fans. “You’ll have to excuse us,” she says, “It’s 35 degrees and the air con has packed in. We’ve 45 minutes before the engineer arrives, so let’s get talking.”

Musgrave’s husband, Peter Mark – conductor and founder of Virginia Opera – is also in the room as a ready back-up to counter Musgrave’s growing deafness, one of the few physical manifestations of her advancing years. Another is the need for a walking stick to get around, but get around she does. When Musgrave arrives in Edinburgh this August, where the International Festival is featuring two of her works, it will be her second transatlantic jaunt this year. She was in Glasgow in May for a celebratory birthday concert by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra and to receive an honorary doctorate from the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, before heading to London to receive the Queen’s Medal for Music. She’ll also be in London during this coming visit for a BBC Proms performance of her music.

“Getting the Queen’s Medal was wonderful,” she says. “I had a delightful half hour with the Queen and Judith Weir, Master of the Queen’s Music. Thankfully, I was excused from having to curtsey because I had a cane, and I had prewarned the lady-in-waiting about my hearing.”

Musgrave presented the slightly older Queen with a newly issued remastered recording of the 1970s American premiere of her opera Mary Queen of Scots, along with a card she herself had received from a Finnish soprano who had sung the title role, which read “Respect the Crown.”

I point out the possible ambiguity over which crown the soprano might be referring to, Scottish or English. More raucous laughter as the irony dawns.

Musgrave belongs to that post-war generation of Scottish composers – others included Iain Hamilton and Thomas Wilson – who embraced European modernism and expressed a worldly vision, thereby paving the way for the huge success of later Scots such as James Macmillan, who could feel at ease basing themselves in Scotland, yet operate confidently and prolifically on the global stage.

She was born in Barnton, just outside Edinburgh. “I spent my early childhood there, though my parents split early on. I don’t ever remember seeing them together, I have no memory of that,” she says. “By the beginning of the war, we’d moved into town, a place my mum and I shared with her sister.” Musgrave’s school education took place at a girls’ boarding school in Shropshire.

She entered Edinburgh University in 1947, initially as a medical student, although she quickly transferred to a music degree to “follow my passion”. She missed the opportunity to study with the legendary Sir Donald Tovey, who had only recently died, but signed up with his former assistant, Molly Grierson, to embrace, albeit second hand, “Tovey’s mastery of long-term structuring and the importance of harmonic planning”.

Her first year at university coincided with the first year of the Edinburgh International Festival. “That was so exciting,” she says. “It was only two years after the war, and while Edinburgh was not bombed to the extent of Glasgow, there was still a darkness across the city. So to see Princes Street lined with bouquets of flowers, and to hear such wonderful music– the chamber music was at the Freemasons’ Hall then – was like a blaze of light across the city.”

Edinburgh gave Musgrave the rigorous grounding in compositional technique she needed, but it was her decision to accept a scholarship to study in Paris with Nadia Boulanger that really opened her eyes to the true excitement of composition.

“It was a very different experience from Edinburgh, where studies of modern music only really went as far as Debussy and Ravel,” she recalls. “Boulanger was a friend of Stravinsky, so her interests were very up-to-date. She didn’t ever force anything, but she was so hot on detail, detail, detail, and she encouraged you to follow your instinct. I was very slow and nervous about it initially, but soon I began