Ina Boyle (1889-1967)

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.Ina Boyle studied privately in Dublin with C.H. Kitson and Percy Buck, she had her first success in 1919 when her orchestral rhapsody, `The magic harp', which was selected for publication by the prestigious Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Adrian Boult. From 1923, realising the need to expand her musical horizons, she visited London for composition lessons with Ralph Vaughan Williams whenever family duties allowed, until her travels were curtailed by the outbreak of the Second World War. Vaughan Williams thought highly of her works but, despite her best efforts to promote them, few were performed in public. During the 1940s some of her orchestral music was broadcast on Radio Eireann in a series of programmes on Irish composers. After the death of her father in 1951, she was again free to travel to London while devoting the rest of her life to composition. As one of twentieth-century Ireland's most prolific composers and the first Irishwoman to undertake a symphony, a concerto and a ballet, this first book on the life and music of Ina Boyle is long overdue.

Ita Beausang is a native of Cork. She studied piano at the Cork School of Music and the Read School of Pianoforte Playing, Dublin. A music graduate of University College Cork, she joined the teaching staff of the Cork Municipal School of Music. She worked as lecturer and Acting Director at DIT Conservatory of Music and Drama. Her book Anglo-Irish Music 1780-1830 (CUP: 1966) is the standard work of the period. In 2014 she was awarded honorary life membership of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. She was an Advisory Editor for the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland (2013) and has researched the life and music of Ina Boyle since 2006. Seamas de Barra is a composer and musicologist. His compositions include orchestral and vocal works, which have been performed and broadcast by The National Orchestra of Ireland, The RTE Concert Orchestra, The BBC Singers, The National Chamber Choir, and other notable ensembles. He has published widely on twentieth-century Irish music and musical life, including a major monograph on Aloys Fleischmann, and was editor (with Patrick Zuk) of a series of monographs on Irish composers issued by Field Day Press in conjunction with the University of Notre Dame. He is currently working on a study of the Irish Symphonist John Kinsella.