Thea Musgrave
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Thea Musgrave (b. 27 May 1928, Barnton, Edinburgh) is a Scottish-born American-based opera composer.
She studied at Edinburgh University and then in Paris, returning to Britain and working on a number of operas in the late 1950s and 1960s. She moved to the United States in the 1970s.
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[edit] Biography
With a list of works that includes ten operas and two ballets, Thea Musgrave is a composer whose creativity is based on a vivid dramatic instinct. Even her concert works may be conceived as dramatic scenarios between individual instruments and orchestral sections, the drama on occasions emphasised by staging instructions to the musicians.
After periods of study in Edinburgh, Paris and the United States, she adopted serialism in the 1960s, though her style later has evolved towards a robust and luxuriant lyricism.
[edit] Career Highlights
1958: attended Tanglewood Festival and studied with Copland.
1971: married American violist and opera conductor Peter Mark and moved to the United States.
1987 - 2002: Distinguished Professor, City University of New York, Queens College.
1995: Premiere of the opera Simón Bolívar at the Virginia Opera.
2003: Premiere of Turbulent Landscapes by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.
[edit] Works
[edit] Key Works
- Chamber Concerto No 2 (1966; chamber ensemble)
- Concerto for Horn (1971)
- Rorate Coeli (1973; choir)
- Simón Bolívar (1989-92; opera)
- Songs for a Winter’s Evening (1995; soprano, orchestra)
- Phoenix Rising (1997, orchestra)
[edit] Operas
- The Abbot of Drimock (1955)
- Marko the Miser (1962)
- The Decision (1965)
- The Voice of Ariadne (1973)
- Mary, Queen of Scots (1977)
- A Christmas Carol (1979)
- An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge (1981)
- Harriet, the Woman called 'Moses' (1984)
- Simón Bolívar (1992)
- Pontalba (2003)