As the conductor Nicholas Cleobury wrote in the 1998 Proms programme, “Boyle chose his teachers well: Spedding encouraged his individual voice; Berkeley reduced wastage and honed his orchestration”.
He has collaborated with several writers, including Vikram Seth ( 8 Beastly Tales ), Richard Stilgoe ( Mine Host ), and Dilys Rose ( Kaspar Hauser and Watching over You ).
In 2006 Boyle won a Creative Scotland Award to enable him to write an opera with a libretto by the Scottish writer and poet Dilys Rose on the subject of the nineteenth century feral child, Kaspar Hauser.
[6] The citation of the judging panel read “A very accomplished score: a powerful and disturbing story told with theatrical flair, dramatic pacing and excellent characterisation.
Boyle has scored several television documentaries and has also worked with the director Murray Grigor writing the music for both Ever To Excel ,[7] which was made in 2012 to mark 600 years of St Andrews University, with a narration by Sean Connery, and Beatus, The Spanish Apocalypse ,[8] premiered in New York in 2014, which explores the corpus of illuminated and illustrated medieval manuscripts based on the 8th century apocalyptic commentary by the monk, Saint Beatus of Liebana.