This bio is reproduced in full with kind permission from Wise Music Classical.
Born: 8 March 1889, Ireland
Died: 10 March 1967
Country most active: Ireland
Also known as: NA
Ina Boyle (8 March 1889 – 10 March 1967) is recognised as Ireland’s most prolific and important female composer of the first half of the 20th century. Her body of work encompassed choral, chamber and orchestral works as well as an opera, ballets and vocal music.
Ina Boyle was born and lived all her life in the family home Bushey Park, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. Her first teacher was her clergyman father, William Foster Boyle. At the age of 11 years she began studying with Samuel Myerscough. Her other teachers included Percy Buck, Charles Kitson, and Charles Wood, to whom she was related by marriage. In 1923 she began her travels to London to take composition lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams, who thought highly of her works. Early successes included an award from the Carnegie Trust for her orchestral rhapsody, The Magic Harp which was performed at the Proms in 1923, conducted by Sir Henry Wood, and a Diplome d’Honneur in the music category of the Olympic Games in 1948 for a chamber work, Lament for Bion.
Both Vaughan Williams and her great friend Elizabeth Maconchy encouraged Ina Boyle to move to London but she would not leave her home and the family who depended on her. Cut off from London musical life, especially during World War 2, meant she made few musical contacts. Ina Boyle continued composing throughout her life. Following her death from cancer in 1967, there were some performances, but she became largely forgotten. Her music manuscripts are preserved in the Library of Trinity College, Dublin, awaiting rediscovery; some have already been digitised and are available for download digitalcollections.tcd.ie.
A revival of interest in Ina Boyle’s life and music is now underway. This has been spearheaded by the Ina Boyle Development Committee and has led to performances, broadcasts and recordings in Ireland, UK and internationally. These include the Composing the Island Festival, 1916-2016, in Dublin, the CD Cello Abbey (premiere of Elegy (1913) for cello and orchestra) recorded by Staatskappelle Weimar 2016, the first CD devoted to her orchestral music, recorded in 2018 by the BBC Concert Orchestra, conducted by Ronald Corp, and the official biography, Ina Boyle 1889 – 1967 – A Composer’s Life by Ita Beausang and Séamus le Barra, published by Cork University Press.
Ina Boyle had a strong religious faith and wrote a large body of choral music, some of which was published in her lifetime. Recent performances of choral works include The Transfiguration (1922) at The Three Choirs Festival in Hereford broadcast on BBC Radio 3, The Gaelic Hymns (1930) at the Ludlow English Song Festival, and Wilt thou not O God go forth with our hosts (1915), dedicated to the 36th Ulster Division, and finally sung for the Commemoration of the Battle of the Somme in St. Columb’s Cathedral, Derry, in 2016.
Vaughan Williams wrote to Ina Boyle in 1937: I think it is most courageous of you to go on with so little recognition. The only thing to say is that it sometimes does come finally. Fifty years after her death his prediction is becoming a reality for this remarkable composer.
This biography is republished from The Dictionary of Irish Biography and was written by Patrick M. Geoghegan. Shared by permission in line with Creative Commons ‘Attribution’ (CC BY) licencing.
Boyle, Ina (Selina Adelaide Philippa) (1889–1967), composer, was born 8 March 1889 in Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow, daughter of Rev. William Foster Boyle, curate in Powerscourt parish, and his wife Philippa Augusta Jephson. Her father made violins and cellos as a hobby. She grew up at Bushey Park near Enniskerry, where she lived all her life. Taught the violin and cello as a child, as well as harmony and counterpoint, she later studied composition privately with Charles Herbert Kitson (1874–1944) and George Hewson. She was a cousin of Charles Wood, who advised her on composition in letters from Cambridge. She published her first compositions in 1915: two anthems ‘He will swallow up death for victory’ and ‘Wilt not thou, O God, go forth with our hosts’. Much of her work was of a religious nature, reflecting her family background and personal beliefs. In 1917 she published ‘Soldiers at peace’, and when it was performed (1920) she described the occasion as the happiest of her life. She won a Carnegie Trust award (1919) for her orchestral work ‘The magic harp’, a piece inspired by Irish mythology, bringing her to public attention for the first time. In 1927 there was an enthusiastic public response to her ‘Glencree’ symphony.
In spring 1928 she visited London to study under Ralph Vaughan Williams. He had a high opinion of her music, and she became one of his favourite pupils. The lessons continued irregularly over the next decade, and in summer 1939 Vaughan Williams paid her a visit at Bushey Park. The previous year Aloys Fleischmann had conducted her pastoral ‘Colin Clout’, along with works by other living composers (including Elizabeth Maconchy, E. J. Moeran, and Frederick May) in an early public concert broadcast by Radio Éireann. Variously writing choral works, song-cycles, string quartets, and larger works for orchestra, she also composed three ballets, one inspired by Holbein and another by Plato. Her inspiration, however, was usually derived from poetry. In 1948 she set Edith Sitwell’s ‘Still falls the rain’ to music, and was later crushed to find that the poet refused permission to use the poem after her five years of work. One of her final works was her only opera, ‘Maudlin of Paplewick’ (1964–6), taken from her own libretto and based on Ben Jonson’s ‘The sad shepherd’.
Boyle was a friend of Elizabeth Maconchy, who described her music as ‘quiet and serious, never brilliant’; Maconchy found its idiom closest to Vaughan Williams in his early middle period, though she stressed that it was ‘not just a pale reflection of his style; her music always speaks with a personal tone of voice’ (Klein, Die Musik Irlands, 369). Boyle’s great regret was that much of her music went unpublished and unplayed. Three of her four last songs, ‘Looking back’, were written in her final summer.
Thin and frail, she usually dressed in grey. She was prone to talking rapidly, with quick nervous movements. She lived alone for much of her life in a house without electricity. Never financially secure, she grew peas one summer to make money. In her later years she had a decreasing regard for her own comfort, and a waning appetite. She died of cancer 10 March 1967 in Enniskerry. She never married. Her manuscripts and scores are in TCD library.