Ina Boyle

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and Wildgeese (1942), received acknowledgement and first performances, the majority of her compositions remained unpublished and unperformed during her lifetime.

[2] Boyle was born in Bushey Park near Enniskerry, County Wicklow, and grew up in a restricted circle of her mother, father and sister.

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.

[3] From 1904 onwards, she also undertook lessons via correspondence with Charles Wood, who was married to Boyle's cousin Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford.

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.

[11] Early recognition came in 1913 when two of her works, the Elegy for cello and orchestra and a setting of Walt Whitman's The Last Invocation, were awarded first and second prizes in the composers' competition at the Sligo Feis Ceoil.

[16] The brief, three-movement Violin Concerto of the early 1930s has (according to Rob Barnett) "more in common with The Lark Ascending than with the big British Isles statements by (Bax, Walton, Dyson, Creith and Moeran) of that decade".

[25] The world premiere of Cædmon's Hymn for six part choir, written in 1925, was given at the Ludlow Festival by the Carice Singers in April 2022.

A feature-length documentary about the life and music of Ina Boyle titled From the Darkness was broadcast 12 June 2010 on Ireland's RTÉ Lyric FM.