Thea Musgrave awarded honorary RPS membership

The Royal Philharmonic Society (RPS) has awarded honorary membership to composer Thea Musgrave CBE. The award was presented to Musgrave at the Manhattan offices of Musgrave’s publisher Novello & Co.

Presenting the award on behalf of the RPS, Vanessa Reed, president and CEO of New Music America, said: ‘Born in 1928, and still hard at work writing music 94 years later, Thea is a musical icon. She has long been beguiled by the inherent theatre of the concert hall, compelling soloists and ensembles to assume new formations, making audiences think anew about what we are witnessing onstage – and our part in it.’

Musgrave was born in Edinburgh in 1928 and studied at the University of Edinburgh and the Paris Conservatoire. Across a 70-year career, she has produced works for the BBC’s Choirs and Orchestras, as well as the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Stockholm Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Opera House, the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra. 

Musgrave has received many accolades including a CBE on the Queen's New Year's Honour List in 2002, the Queen’s Medal for music in 2017, the Koussevitzky Award and two Guggenheim Fellowships. Musgrave has also been awarded honorary degrees from Old Dominion University (Virginia), Smith College, Glasgow University and the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston.

Wiebke Busch, managing director of Novello & Co Ltd, said: ‘When one considers her contribution to the canon of classical music, over seven decades, [Musgrave’s] name sits easily amongst the household names of the centuries gone by. Through the stylistic twists and turns of the twentieth century, her voice has remained strident and unique, and I am delighted that in recent years she has begun to garner the international recognition that she richly deserves.’

The RPS Honorary Membership was first awarded in 1826 to Carl Maria von Weber, with more recent recipients including Richard Strauss, Stephen Sondheim, and most recently Jordi Savall in 2022. The award is presented in recognition of music industry members who uplift others with their creations. A full list of Honorary Membership recipients can be found here.

You can find out more about the RPS here.