Ina Boyleaus modern

Ina Boyle(* 8. March 1889; † 10. March 1967) was an Irish composer.

Life

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. 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. 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. From 1923, Boyle began to travel to London to take lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams. After exchanging correspondence, Boyle took her first composition lesson with Vaughan Williams at his home in February 1923.

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.

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. 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.

Ina Boyle died of cancer in Greystones, County Wicklow, and her papers are archived in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin. Trinity College has digitised most of her music manuscripts, and they can be searched and studied online.

She was the most prolific and significant female composer from Ireland before 1950. 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 during her lifetime, the majority of her compositions remain unpublished and unperformed.

Source Wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ina_Boyle