|
Home | Archive
| Winter 2000 | In memoriam
Brian Boydell 1917–2000
When a definitive history of twentieth-century Irish music
comes to be written, Brian Boydell will feature recurrently and with
high distinction as composer, conductor, musicologist and animateur.
Indeed, it is to him that we owe the distinctive presence of Irish
classical music in the global music arena.
An Irishman through-and-through (born in Dublin on St Patrick’s
Day) but largely educated in England, Boydell enjoyed a stimulating
upbringing, as much at home in science (which he read at Cambridge)
and painting as in music, which he studied at the Royal College
of Music, with Patrick Hadley and Herbert Howells.
As a composer, Boydell eschewed the avant-garde (though he was
enormously supportive of younger composers whose muse led them in
that direction) and looked to the solid workmanship and purity of
Bach, Sibelius and Hindemith, evident as much in his first characteristic
works, the String Trio of 1944 and In memoriam Mahatama Gandhi
of 1946, as in later works, such as the Second String Quartet, the
Violin Concerto, Megalithic ritual dances, A terrible
beauty is born, the choral Mors et vita and the tone-poem
Masai Mara. In all, Boydell created an impressive body
of well-crafted if conservative music, for a variety of forces.
The possessor of a fine baritone voice, Boydell taught singing
for eight years at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, during which
period he composed three song cycles. As conductor of the Dublin
Orchestral Players and director of the Dowland Consort, an early
music group which he founded in 1958, he introduced much new and
old repertoire to Irish audiences. As a scholar, Boydell’s
initial main area of research was the Italian madrigal, but after
his retirement from the Chair of Music at Trinity College Dublin
in 1982, a position he held for twenty years, and his admission
to the Aosdana (the state-sponsored artists’ association),
he turned his attention to the eighteenth-century musical life of
his home city, publishing the Dublin musical calendar 1700–1760.
Brian Boydell: born 17 March 1917; died 7 November 2000
|
