Frederick May

Frederick May is widely regarded as a seminal figure in Irish contemporary composition, even though his output was relatively small. His composing career was cut short due to ill-health: his last completed work, Sunlight and shadow, dates from 1955, thirty years before his death. May eschewed the prevailing 'national' musical aesthetic, instead embracing contemporary European modernism. He studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gordon Jacob in London between 1930 and 1933, and soon afterwards took lessons in Vienna with Egon Wellesz.

Frederick May: String quartet in C minor
TCD MS 4928

May was appointed musical director at the Abbey Theatre in January 1936, and in the same year composed his string quartet. He acknowledged that news of the early death of Alban Berg in December 1935, together with the onset of his struggle with escalating deafness, had a significant influence on the composition. The quartet received its first performance in London in 1948, and was recorded in 1974 by the Aeolian Quartet. The score was published in Dublin by Woodtown Press in 1976. The Times music critic Felix Aprahamian described the quartet as 'an unusually eloquent and assured work in a tonal idiom in which passionate expression and compositional discipline are perfectly integrated'.

Frederick May: Songs from prison
TCD MS 4926

Songs from prison is a setting for baritone and orchestra of texts by Ernst Toller and Erich Stadlen. The text depicts the brutal destruction by prison warders of a nest of swallows outside the cell window of a political prisoner. This symbolic attempt to extinguish the prisoner's hope of redemption ultimately fails. May's deeply-felt setting doubtless reflects the political atmosphere he had experienced as a student in Vienna, as well as the war which formed the backdrop as he composed the piece in 1941. It was first performed for a BBC broadcast on 14 December 1942, and received its first Irish performance four years later in December 1946, with fellow-composer Brian Boydell as soloist.

Ina Boyle

Ina Boyle lived all her life in her family home at Bushey Park, Enniskerry, Co. Wicklow. After early studies with Percy Buck, C.H. Kitson, and Charles Wood, between 1923 and 1939 she made occasional visits to London to take private lessons in composition with Ralph Vaughan Williams. She had the distinction of being the only female composer to receive an award from the Carnegie Trust, for her orchestral work The magic harp, published by Stainer & Bell in 1921. However most of her music remained unpublished and unperformed.
Boyle continued to compose a broad range of music throughout her life, including songs and choral pieces, chamber music and orchestral works, ballets and an opera.

Notes on lessons from Dr Vaughan Williams 1928-1939
TCD MS 10959

Boyle kept notes of her encounters with Vaughan Williams, which she later transcribed into a notebook, and their warm rapport is clear from her recollections. On 15 March 1930 she visited Vaughan Williams at his home in Dorking and showed him the score of her second symphony. They spent the day working on the orchestration, and also discussed plans to have some of her Gaelic hymns published by Stainer & Bell.

Ina Boyle: Symphony no. 3 'From the darkness'
TCD MS 4111

Ina Boyle's third symphony 'From the darkness' was composed between 1946 and 1952. It is a setting for contralto and orchestra of excerpts from three poems by Edith Sitwell: 'Invocation', 'An old woman', and 'Harvest'. After she had completed the score Boyle wrote to Sitwell requesting permission to use the texts, but the poet sent a rather condescending reply, refusing consent.

Ina Boyle's register of musical compositions
TCD MS 4172

Boyle was deeply upset by Sitwell's refusal of consent to set her poems. She tried to salvage her work by substituting alternative words of her own but was unhappy with the results: 'the loss of her beautiful poems was so great that I have made no further use of it.'
After Sitwell's death Boyle's friend and neighbour Sheila Wingfield, Lady Powerscourt, made use of a chance encounter with Sacheverell Sitwell to protest about the embargo. As a result, in 1975 the Sitwell estate granted Boyle's friend, the composer Elizabeth Maconchy, the right to publish the settings.

Brian Boydell

Brian Boydell was one of the most influential figures in Irish cultural life from the 1940s until his death. After studies at Heidelberg, Cambridge, and London, Boydell embarked on a multi-faceted career as composer, conductor, singer, teacher, broadcaster, academic researcher and writer. For many years he represented the interests of creative artists on the Arts Council. He was appointed Professor of Music at the University of Dublin in 1962, and succeeded in establishing the School of Music as a fully-fledged academic department in 1974.
In his approach to composition, Boydell was avowedly cosmopolitan in outlook. He believed that self-conscious reliance on folk music idioms to denote Irishness was a cul-de-sac; instead national character would emerge naturally from the composer's engagement with the cultural environment in which he lived.

Dowland Consort publicity brochure
TCD MS 11128/1/5/Dowland/214

As a performer and broadcaster, Brian Boydell was keen to develop the audience for music in Ireland. The Dowland Consort was a semi-professional vocal ensemble which he founded and directed. It performed Renaissance vocal music throughout Ireland (and occasionally in the UK) between 1959 and 1969. Boydell explained that the group 'attempted to create the relaxed and intimate atmosphere of domestic music making by sitting informally around a semi-circular table'. In its decade of activity the Consort developed a repertoire of over 300 works, broadcast on RTE and the BBC, issued an LP recording, and in 1964 received a Harriet Cohen International Music Award.

Brian Boydell: In Memoriam Mahatma Gandhi, op. 30
TCD MS 4942

Boydell was deeply moved by the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi in January 1948. Like Gandhi, he held strongly pacifist views, later becoming involved in the Irish Pacifist Movement and Amnesty International. He immediately began work on an orchestral piece in honour of Gandhi, conducting its first performance on 20 July 1948. The piece became one of Boydell's most popular works: the title page of the score records seven further performances in Ireland and abroad between 1948 and 1955.

Brian Boydell: String quartet no. 3, op. 65
TCD MS 4955

Boydell composed four works for string quartet: three numbered quartets, and an Adagio and scherzo, op. 89. He valued these works highly, stating that they are 'the works I would save if everything else was lost'.
The third quartet, op. 65, was written in 1969 for the RTE String Quartet, and received its first performance at the National Gallery on 20 September 1970. Interviewed at the time of its composition, Boydell described this single-movement work as 'an avowal of my musical beliefs … I feel it is terribly honest music, and it's what I believe to be beautiful'.

Fishing register
TCD MS 11128/1/23/Fishing reg 1

Boydell had many interests beyond music, amongst which were fishing, gardening, and the natural world. This fishing register notes the environmental damage caused to the river Boyne by drainage works in 1971.

Brian Boydell: Masai Mara, op. 87
TCD MS 11128/3/Masai sketch 1 (1)

Boydell's long-held concerns about human destruction of the natural environment find expression in his last orchestral work, Masai Mara, op. 87, composed in 1988. The piece was inspired by a visit to the Kenyan game reserve, where the composer was struck by the unspoilt beauty of the landscape. The work opens with bird-calls evoking 'a timeless and mysteriously peaceful world, as it was before human beings began to disturb its natural beauty'. At the end of the piece, a motif from Boydell's first string quartet (composed forty years earlier) is used as the basis for 'a passionate prayer for a positive resolution of the struggle against destructive forces'.

Gerald Barry

Gerald Barry is Ireland's most widely acclaimed contemporary composer. After graduating from University College Dublin he went abroad for further studies in composition with Peter Schat, Mauricio Kagel, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Barry's first successes were chamber pieces, but he came to greater prominence with two large-scale works: the orchestral piece Chevaux-de-frise premiered at the BBC Proms in London in 1988, and his first opera The Intelligence Park, staged at the Almeida Festival, London in 1990. Though he has continued to write in a variety of genres, he is particularly known for his operatic works.

Correspondence between Gerald Barry and Samuel Beckett
TCD MS 10668/2a

While still a student at University College Dublin in 1973, Gerald Barry wrote to Samuel Beckett requesting permission to set some text from his poem Lessness. Beckett granted permission, claiming no fee for the use of his poem. Barry subsequently withdrew all works he composed before 1977, so the two Beckett settings - All the dead voices and Lessness - can no longer be performed.

Gerald Barry: Chevaux-de-frise
(pitch chart)
TCD MS 10670

Chevaux-de-frise caused some controversy when it was first performed by the Ulster Orchestra at the BBC Proms in 1988, with shouts of 'Rubbish!' heard from some members of the audience. The piece commemorates the 400th anniversary of the defeat of the Spanish Armada. It comes across as a sustained onslaught of aggressive sound, but its overall effect tends to conceal the intricacies of its construction. Barry generated some of his musical material by creating a pitch chart from a list of Armada shipwrecks off the coast of Ireland, transcribing the names and locations from an appendix to Niall Fallon's book The Armada in Ireland (London, 1978). Oxford University Press published a facsimile of Barry's manuscript score in 1988.

Gerald Barry: The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit
(vocal score)
TCD MS 10667/236

Barry's fondness for using pre-existing material in a subversive way is evident in his second opera, The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit, which was commissioned for television and transmitted in March 1994. The libretto by Meredith Oakes is based on Handel's last oratorio The Triumph of Time and Truth (1757), a moralistic allegory in which Beauty is persuaded by Time and Truth to renounce Pleasure in order to nurture the soul. In the reworking by Oakes and Barry, Time and Truth are outmanoeuvred through the machinations of Deceit, leaving Beauty free to pursue Pleasure.

Gerald Barry: The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit
(libretto draft)
TCD MS 10667/23/3

Barry's strong influence over the text is clear from his handwritten amendments to successive drafts of Oakes' libretto, as seen here in an excerpt from Act II. The music, for five male singers and fifteen instrumentalists, is characteristically intense and energetic. The word setting often ignores the natural accents of Oakes' rhyming couplets, and the most virtuosic instrumental challenges occur in the nineteen orchestral interludes that punctuate the work.