Friday, July 17, 2020

A health librarian and music - Ina Boyle

I was driving back from the computer shop after buying a plug in keyboard to address the fact that my laptop was no longer (or loner) allowing me to type g and h.


The car radio told me what it was called, but not who wrote it.   I thought it sounded like Ralph Vaughan Williams, but it was not.  It was in fact (as you may have known) by Ina Boyle.  She lived in County Wicklow, Ireland, composed symphonies and concertos, settings of Irish and English language poems, including English translations of Scottish Gaelic.  She was a student of Vaughan Williams.   I had, I have to say, not heard of her and it seems from the website of the Ina Boyle Society that she is not as well known as she ought to be.

She went to study with Vaughan Williams in 1923.  It isn't clear from the Society website (or Wikipedia, for that matter) when she stopped, although a 2013 blogpost from Trinity College Dublin Library mentions a lesson in 1930.  This symphony dates from 1927.  Does it show his influence?   Or am I imagining it?   It would be interesting to know (and would take a music scholar not a health librarian) whether her later works also show that influence, and indeed, whether it's just my amateur ear that thinks this symphony sounds like Vaughan Williams (although before I knew she had been a student of his, it did remind me of his work).

Trinity College Dublin has Boyle's papers, and has digitised some of her manuscripts.  On that site, put Boyle in the search box, and choose the entry with 90 items.  There are music manuscripts, and diaries.  The abstract of the items includes a brief biography of Boyle.

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