Supported by Gerard Victory and the conductor Hans Waldemar Rosen he had a number of works accepted for performance by RTÉ ensembles, including his first two string quartets (1960, 1968), a chamber concerto (1964), Montage (1965) for soprano and chamber ensemble, Two Pieces for String Orchestra (1965), and Montage II (1970) for orchestra.
This group of works culminated in A Selected Life (1973), a large-scale composition based on verses written in memory of the recently deceased Seán Ó Riada by his brother Thomas.
As he found himself growing increasingly disillusioned with the avant-garde his attitude to his own work began to change: he came to question the artistic validity of much of what he had written.
As part of an arrangement made with RTÉ on his retirement, the station undertook to commission a series of large-scale orchestral works from him.
Later, in De Barra's words (2013), "(t)he idiom Kinsella evolved […] seeks to reclaim from the twelve-tone series the structuring force of tonal attraction.