We're delighted to present an extract from Ina Boyle (1889-1967): A Composer’s Life, by Ita Beausang and Séamas de Barra, published by Cork University Press.
The Irish composer, Ina Boyle (1889-1967), was born in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, where she enjoyed a sheltered childhood as a member of an Anglo-Irish family with roots in the medical, military and diplomatic professions. Her first music teacher was her clergyman father, who made violins for a hobby. She started to compose from an early age and soon found a passion for music that lasted a lifetime, spanning two world wars, the 1916 rebellion, the war of independence, the civil war and the economic war. One of twentieth-century Ireland’s most prolific composers, she was the first Irishwoman to undertake a symphony, a concerto and a ballet.
First, an extract from the preface, by Ita Beausang:
When in 2006 I was originally invited to write on the life and works of the Irish composer Ina Boyle (1889–1967) I had heard neither her name nor her music, although she was the first Irishwoman to undertake a symphony, a concerto or a ballet, and was also one of the most prolific composers in twentieth-century Ireland.
Ina Boyle’s sheltered background in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, seems a most unlikely environment for a composer. Her early musical influences came from a violin-making father and lessons with governesses. There were no opportunities for attending concerts or for hearing orchestral music. It is difficult to imagine what gave her the impetus to become a composer as she studied theory and harmony from an early age with Samuel Myerscough and took correspondence lessons with Charles Wood.
She was reclusive, even other-worldly. Her music was concentrated in the minor mode and did not keep pace with the times or with popular trends
The pattern for her musical life was firmly established when she continued her studies with the English musicians C. H. Kitson and Percy Buck, who had taken posts for short periods in Dublin. She did not pursue a formal course in music study in either of the most obvious Dublin institutions, the Royal Irish Academy of Music or Trinity College Dublin, but opted instead for one-on-one tuition. The selection of her orchestral rhapsody The Magic Harp for publication by the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust in 1920 set the seal on her career as a composer. Her next musical destination would add new dimensions to her life and career. On her visits to London for private lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams she went to concerts and art exhibitions and enjoyed a range of musical activities that were unavailable in the Dublin of the inter-war years. Vaughan Williams was her mentor for sixteen years, until her travels ended with the outbreak of the Second World War. The aim of this monograph is not only to chronicle Boyle’s life and to place her output in context, but also to explain why so little was known about her, why she was forgotten for so many years and why so few of her works have been published or performed. Her friend Elizabeth Maconchy, who gave Boyle generous support during her lifetime and was her musical executor after her death, offered an explanation in her Appreciation of the composer: But living out of the world, though it suited her temperamentally, had the disadvantage that she made very few musical contacts and that her music remained little known and almost unperformed. All composers need to hear performances of their work, not only for stimulation and encouragement but in order to learn their craft and advance their technique.
Boyle produced a steady stream of compositions in virtually all genres: orchestral music, chamber music, choral music, vocal music and even, at the end of her life, opera.
She lived all her life out of the world, in the Enniskerry home she loved so much, not far from the Irish capital, Dublin, but somehow a whole universe away. She was reclusive, even other-worldly. Her music was concentrated in the minor mode and did not keep pace with the times or with popular trends. Perhaps her themes were too sombre for a changing world in search of distraction. She never won the recognition that Vaughan Williams hoped for her, yet her commitment to her vision remained intact as she followed her own path as a composer. It is hoped that this opportunity to revisit her life and the ongoing upsurge of interest in her music will help to bring the voice of this long-neglected Irish composer to a wider audience.
An extract from an essay on Boyle's music, by Séamas de Barra:
Much of the student work that Ina Boyle produced is preserved amongst her papers in Trinity College Dublin. Her creative gifts developed quite naturally in tandem with these technical studies and emerged in an easy, unforced way. The line between an assigned task and a genuine composition may have been blurred initially, but by the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, when she was twenty-five years old, some of the pieces she had written seemed to her to be something more than mere exercises: these included over twenty songs, a handful of choral pieces, an Elegy for violoncello and orchestra, and a work for baritone solo, chorus and orchestra entitled Ireland, to words by Walt Whitman.She scored a modest success in 1913 when both the Elegy and one of the songs were awarded prizes at Sligo Feis Ceoil, and encouraged by this, perhaps, in 1915 she wrote two anthems to texts that seemed appropriate for a time of war, and had them published in London at her own expense.
Her music was concentrated in the minor mode and did not keep pace with the times or with popular trends. Perhaps her themes were too sombre for a changing world in search of distraction.
From then until the mid-1960s, a few years before she died, Ina Boyle produced a steady stream of compositions in virtually all genres: orchestral music, chamber music, choral music, vocal music and even, at the end of her life, opera. Despite this productivity, however, much of what she wrote – including some of her finest work – remained unheard at the time it was written and still awaits performance today. There were a few periods in her life when her music did succeed to some extent in reaching the public, particularly in the 1920s and the 1940s, but, on the whole, performances remained intermittent and wider recognition eluded her altogether.
The object of the present essay is to survey this largely unknown corpus of work by one of the most elusive and intriguing figures in early twentieth century Irish music. Its aim is not to be exhaustive, but rather – by focusing on selected works – to give an idea of her technical and stylistic approach to composition and to show the range of her achievement. If it succeeds in illuminating to some degree the nature of Ina Boyle’s art and leads to a deeper appreciation of her position in the history of Irish music, it will have realised its purpose, but it is also hoped that it may prompt others to examine her work for themselves and, perhaps, help redeem half a century of neglect by stimulating the interest of prospective performers.
Ina Boyle (1889-1967): A Composer’s Life, published by Cork University Press, is out now.
