Ina Boyle (8 March 1889 – 10 March 1967) was an Irish composer. Her compositions encompass a broad spectrum of genres and include choral, chamber and orchestral works as well as opera, ballet and vocal music. While a number of her works, including The Magic Harp (1919), Colin Clout (1921), Gaelic Hymns (1923–24), Glencree (1924-27) and Wildgeese (1942), received acknowledgement and first performances, the majority of her compositions remained unpublished and unperformed during her lifetime.[1]
Boyle was born in Bushey Park near Enniskerry, County Wicklow, and grew up in a restricted circle of her mother, father and sister. Her first music lessons were with her father William Foster Boyle (1860–1951), who was curate at St. Patrick's Church, Powerscourt, and was given violin and cello lessons by her governess with her younger sister Phyllis. From the age of eleven, she studied theory and harmony with Samuel Myerscough, the English organist who founded the Leinster School of Music in 1904.[2] From 1904 onwards, she also undertook lessons via correspondence with Charles Wood, who was married to Boyle's cousin Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford.
From 1910 Boyle took lessons with Percy Buck who had just been appointed a non-resident professor of music at Trinity College Dublin. By 1913 she was studying counterpoint, harmony and composition with Charles Herbert Kitson and George Hewson in Dublin.[3] Kitson encouraged her to compose the two anthems published in 1915, but his promise of a performance at Christ Church did not happen in the end.[2] From 1923, Boyle began to travel to London to take lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams.[4] After exchanging correspondence, Boyle took her first composition lesson with Vaughan Williams at his home in February 1923.[5]
Boyle's music received a series of first performances during the 1920s and 1930s in England, but though well-received they were very infrequent. She gained some benefit from her involvement with a group of other young female composers including Elisabeth Lutyens, Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams, who organised a concert series as performance opportunity.[6]
But the need to look after her family at home restricted her travelling, which mostly ceased altogether from the outset of war. Boyle continued to compose every day. Though isolated she nevertheless maintained contact with her peers and continually sent her scores to conductors and choir directors in the hope of further performances.[7] In 1944 an orchestral concert devoted to her music was organised by Arthur Duff. However, with one exception (the brief orchestral overture Wildgeese of 1942), no new work of hers ever received a second performance.[8]
Ina Boyle died of cancer in Greystones, County Wicklow.[9]
Because of her isolation, Boyle's music was seldom performed. However, she continued to compose until her death.[10] Early recognition came in 1913 when two of her works, the Elegy for cello and orchestra and a setting of Walt Whitman's The Last Invocation, were awarded first and second prizes in the composers' competition at the Sligo Feis Ceoil.[2] In 1919, her orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp received a Carnegie Award, through which it was published and was taken up by the conductor Dan Godfrey in Bournemouth.[11][12]
The first of her three symphonies was composed between 1924 and 1927, but had to wait until 1945 for its first complete performance, at a Raidió Éireann studio concert.[13] Subtitled Glencree ("In the Wicklow Hills"), the three movements take the form of tone poems describing specific locations: "On Lacken Hill", "Nightwinds in the Valley", and "Above Lough Bray".[14] The second symphony (The Dream of the Rood), composed in 1930, received its world premiere on 30 September 2022 in Dublin, performed by the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra, conductor David Brophy.[15]
The brief, three-movement Violin Concerto of the early 1930s has (according to Rob Barnett) "more in common with The Lark Ascending than with the big British Isles statements by (Bax, Walton, Dyson, Creith and Moeran) of that decade".[16] The Concerto was dedicated to Boyle's mother who had died in 1932. Lament for Bion, a Greek-themed composition for tenor and strings she submitted to the Olympic Cultural Activities Committee, won an Olympic Honourable Mention in 1948 for Ireland.[17][18]
Her String Quartet in E minor (1934) was dedicated to Anne Macnaghten. A private recording was made by the Macnaghten Quartet, but the score remained in manuscript until a new edition was made in 2011, used for the first modern performance by the Callino Quartet on 4 February 2011.[19] The ConTempo Quartet also performed the quartet in 2022[20] and a recording was issued in 2023 by the Piatti Quartet.[21]
Boyle also wrote about 60 solo songs throughout her career, around half of which have now been recorded.[22] The early choral work Soldiers at Peace (1916) has been revived by Highgate Choral Society and the New London Orchestra, directed by Ronald Corp, who performed it in London on 2 November, 2018.[23] The world premiere of Cædmon's Hymn for six part choir, written in 1925, was given at the Ludlow Festival by the Carice Singers in April 2022.[24]
Boyle has been dubbed "the most prolific and significant female composer from Ireland before 1950".[25] Her papers are archived in the Library of Trinity College Dublin.[26] Trinity College has digitised most of her music manuscripts, and they can be searched and studied online.
A feature-length documentary about the life and music of Ina Boyle titled From the Darkness was broadcast 12 June 2010 on Ireland's RTÉ Lyric FM. In April and May 2013, an exhibition at Trinity College highlighted "Ina Boyle’s Symphonic Journey".[27] A CD of some of her major orchestral works, including the first full recording of her Symphony No. 1 and first ever performance of the Psalm for cello and orchestra, was issued by Dutton in 2018.[16]
Choral music
Orchestra
Solo voice with orchestra
Songs (for voice and piano, if not otherwise mentioned)
Opera
Ballet scores
Chamber music
