It is both St Patrick’s Day and Women’s History Month, so I thought it might be appropriate to feature one of Ireland’s most prolific composers, Ina Boyle. Never heard of her? Even in her lifetime, as she was churning out chamber music, choral pieces, concertos, and symphonies, most of her work was never performed, so you’re not alone. But she wrote more classical music than any other Irishwoman up through the mid 20th-century.
Ina Boyle was born in 1889 in a small village called Enniskerry, just south of Dublin in the foothills of the Wicklow mountains where she probably saw the Powerscourt Waterfall (Ireland’s tallest at 120 meters) nearby. She lived all her life in a large estate home, taking care of her family which included her mother, father, and sister. She received music lessons from a very young age, and eventually she travelled to London between 1923-1939 to study music composition with the musician Ralph Vaughn Williams. However, her life was overall quite isolated, and she mostly stayed local. After the Second World War began, Boyle’s travels to London ceased.
Her musical pieces, however, are sophisticated and moving. The Oxford Leader website calls her work “serious and introspective,” and that it takes cues from European-wide orchestral trends of the day, but she also readily borrowed from her Irish heritage in her compositional ideas. One of her most famous pieces is “The Magic Harp: Rhapsody for Orchestra,” and it was inspired by Irish mythology and the story of the Durd Alba” a magical harp of Ireland’s ancient Gods. In 1919, this piece won a Carnegie Award, making Ina the first woman composer to do so.
Despite the fact that those who heard her musical pieces praised them, Boyle’s music went relatively unplayed in her lifetime — she herself never got to hear many of her own works. The Ina Boyle Association states that “the majority of her huge output is still in manuscript form and unperformed.” I’ll put links to a couple of pieces in the comments below just in case you’re interested in hearing her work.
