Thea Musgrave

Thea Musgrave (b. 27 May 1928, Barnton, Edinburgh) is a Scottish-born, American-based composer of opera and classical music. 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. Thea Musgrave's creativity is based on a dramatic instinct. Aside from her operas, her concert works are conceived as dramatic scenarios between individual instruments and orchestral sections, the drama on occasions emphasised by giving 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 more luxuriant lyricism.