Thea Musgrave has turned 90 and is still highly active. She was present in Stockholm during the festival in November 2018. With her picturesque and dramatically figurative music, Thea Musgrave has a rare ability to take hold and draw the listener in to her multi-faceted world. She often turns to visual art to find inspiration for her music.

The inspiration for Turbulent Landscapes comes from the English artist William Turner. These six movements, despite their shared inspirational material, are also very different. Each movement is based on a specific painting, except for the second, which is based on three paintings. In addition, someone from the orchestra is featured as a soloist in each movement. 

Thea Musgrave was born in 1928 in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she studied at the university before moving to Paris. There, she spent four years studying under Nadia Boulanger at the conservatory. After her studies, she was active for a period in London before she was granted a professorship at the University of California, Santa Barbara in 1970. Two years later, she moved permanently to the US, where she still lives.