Ina Boyle (1889–1967): A Composer's Life by Ita Beausang (review)

In 1974, a twelve-page appreciation of Ina Boyle was written by Elizabeth Maconchy (1907–1994), an English composer of Irish descent, and published by the Dolmen Press for the Library of Trinity College in Dublin (Elizabeth Maconchy, Ina Boyle: An Appreciation, with a Select List of Her Music [Dublin: Dolmen, 1974]). In writing this short text, Maconchy aimed to commemorate her good friend and make Boyle's musical contributions visible to a wider audience. She provided biographical details and highlights from Boyle's musical career as well as a select list of Boyle's compositions, hoping that they would spark interest by amateur and professional performers. Maconchy was Boyle's champion, during and after her life.

Ita Beausang's biography Ina Boyle (1889–1967): A Composer's Life is the first full-length book to examine the life and music of one of Ireland's most prolific, yet largely unknown, twentieth-century composers. This publication is one of several initiatives, including a Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) centenary project, Composing the Island, that aim to raise the profile of Irish composers, including Boyle, whose works received few performances during her lifetime. Beausang writes that one of the reasons for this text is to "explain why so little was known about her, why she was forgotten for so many years and why so few of her works have been published or performed" (p. viii).

Boyle was a shy, reclusive composer whose commitment to her art is visible through the size of her compositional output as well as through the materials she kept about her musical studies and interactions with performers, mentors, and publishers. In this biography, Beasuang explores the numerous challenges Boyle faced that prevented her from pursuing a music career beyond her sheltered home in Enniskerry. Beausang relied on primary sources housed in the Selina (Ina) Boyle Musical Manuscripts Miscellaneous collection at Trinity College, Dublin (some items have been digitized at https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/home [accessed 1 September 2019]). She used these materials, including notes written during music lessons, correspondence, and newspapers, to assess and describe Boyle's experiences as a student, composer, and woman living and working in Ireland during the early to mid-twentieth century. She also conducted interviews and email communication with people who knew Boyle (e.g., Nicola LeFanu).

Beausang presents this biography of Boyle in five chapters organized thematically within a mostly chronological narrative. The first ("The Growth of a Composer") focuses on Boyle's music education and the challenges and successes during her early years as a composer, while the second ("Lessons in London") examines Boyle's progress in compositional studies with one of her better-known teachers, Ralph Vaughan Williams. In the third chapter ("A Changing World"), Beausang shifts the focus to Boyle's interaction with a network of women who became her friends and advocates of her music. The fourth chapter ("Post War") explores the changing landscape of the music scene in Ireland since 1947 and Boyle's place in this environment, and the fifth ("A Composer's Life") further examines the challenges she faced throughout her career, specifically the difficulties of self-promoting her music for publication and performance. Beausang also identifies the struggles in Boyle's private life at home as caretaker of her younger sister, Phyllis, and her father. Following these five chapters is an essay by Séamus de Barra that analyzes a selection of compositions to demonstrate Boyle's compositional style and technique.

Beausang begins the biography with a discussion of Boyle's family roots, early music education, and music teachers (including Samuel Spencer Myerscough, Charles Wood, Percy C. Buck, and C. H. Kitson). She focuses on Boyle's early compositions (ca. 1903–14) that are in the manuscript collection, along with the corrections and annotations made by her teachers. The majority of Boyle's...