The Life and Music of Brian Boydell (review)

When the history of music in twentieth-century Ireland is written, the name of Brian Boydell (1917–2000) will be writ large. Few musicians of his time working in the Republic of Ireland came near his combination of influence, broad achievement, and public profile, as a composer, scholar, teacher, administrator, shaper of musical policy, and communicator on television and radio.

Boydell's impact on music in Ireland bears comparison with that made in England, from the 1880s to the early years of the twentieth century, by another Anglo-Irish musician born in Dublin, Charles Villiers Stanford. It is probable that Boydell's visible legacy will show priorities similar to Stanford's—composition and scholarship, in that order. And like Stanford, whose impact on music education and practice was as beneficial as it was enduring, Boydell has a less obvious legacy that is likely to prove more important than either of those. This Renaissance man might not have been flattered by the comparison, for he was profoundly unsympathetic to Stanford's concept of Irishness. However, like his predecessor, Boydell was a tireless campaigner who lived to see his causes taken up by others. They thought that their work was the norm and were only dimly aware of his role in consolidating the ground on which they stood. Such is the legacy of the best campaigners—their work lives on not in their name, but in the benefits to their subject.

The sum of this book's contents never could have lived up to its generous title. The original plan was for a Festschrift to celebrate Boydell's 80th birthday; but as one of the editors, Michael Taylor, points out, 'the inevitable delays have meant that this is, instead, a memorial volume' (p. 63). What has emerged is a small book with five contributors, of whom three are editors. The want of a single guiding hand is sometimes evident. Furthermore, any assessment so closely associated with its subject is perforce restricted. As Lytton Strachey's elegantly waspish prose declared nearly ninety years ago, 'ignorance is the first requisite of the historian—ignorance, which simplifies and clarifies, which selects and omits, with a placid perfection unattainable by the highest art' (Preface to Eminent Victorians, 1918).

The opening essay by Axel Klein (another of the editors), 'Brian Boydell: Of Man and Music', is a cool-headed portrait of the man and of his influence on Irish music from the 1940s into the 1980s. Its judicious blend of facts and quotations, plus some neat slices of contextual observation, make it read far more enjoyably than is initially suggested by the formal style of its prose. Klein's analysis of the ways in which Boydell's personality intersected with his Anglo-Irish background and his education in England is revealing. However, the greater value of this essay is its illumination of why Boydell, his music and his policies, were so influential. For example, when discussing the state of Irish music around 1950, Klein identifies Boydell, then in his mid-thirties, as the most positive and wide-ranging of those who supported the concept of nationalism in music. In thought and practice, his international perspective made him stand out.

In an article published in 1951 Boydell attributed the then dismal situation of music in Ireland partly to the fact that although people tended to 'do a great deal of talking . . . positive action seldom follows all the talk' (p. 14). He was already a proven doer: his orchestral work In memoriam Mahatma Gandhi (1948) had attracted international attention, and not just because of its apposite subject. By 1952 the equally internationalist critic and commentator Denis Donoghue was able to claim, 'Within the last few years it has become clear that Brian Boydell is the most active composer in Ireland; in my opinion he is also the best. I believe that if Irish music is to have any future he will form an important part of...