The City of London School is featuring Ina Boyle’s String Quartet in a concert that happens to take place on the composer’s birthday. The program will also include works by Lili Boulanger.

More information available here

Program Note:

Ina Boyle (1889-1967) studied with Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958) between 1923 and 1939. It is of note that RVW taught a number of woman composers, both at the RCM and, as in the case of Ina Boyle , as private pupils. These include such figures as Ruth Gipps, Dame Elizabeth Maconchy and Grace Williams; other names, with whose musics we are perhaps also learning to become familiar and with whom Boyle enjoyed enduring musical friendships.

Rehearsing any piece of music with which I am unfamiliar is always a fascinating business. Rehearsing a work, where the composer was previously unknown to me is doubly so. The temptation to find parallels in the music of other composers and traditions – RVW, Holst, Elgar, Irish folk music – is strong and even if motivated by a wish to find into a way a musical language, would deny the composer her voice. That said, it is fascinating to speculate on whose music she did know. In the extracts of her digitised diaries, held by Trinity College Dublin, we see Boyle discussing with RVW performances of Janacek’s Sinfonietta (1926) and Schoenberg’s Third String Quartet (1927); she was clearly no Charles Ives figure, that American composer we cite when we want to name drop someone whose compositional choices at times fell outside the expected, due to his perceived isolation.

In a passage believed to have been copied at a much later date; it is in biro, which had not yet been invented, we find: Nov. 6th 1934 Dr. RV said he liked the material of the first movement [of the quartet] but thought the construction unsatisfactory. I was so hoping to find a roaring endorsement! The monograph on Boyle by Dr Ita Beausang and Seamas de Barra, details the long relationship between Boyle and RVW; this comment should be therefore be read in the context of a teacher and later friend who did very much to champion her music and clearly thought much of her as a composer.

Approaching a piece of music as a conductor, the music is on the page and is therefore a given. It is not so much a question of how material could have been rearranged or developed differently, but of how to lift the notes off the page into a performance. The excellent, recently released, premiere recording of this work by the Piatti Quartet has confirmed my musical thoughts about this piece. The Senior String Orchestra have worked with their customary musical intelligence on this music.

Harmonically, the movement opens with an E minor chord in close position with an added F# in the violin I part. This dissonant major ninth continues to feature both harmonically and melodically throughout the movement. The opening phrase quickly opens out so that by bar 7, there are three octaves between violin I and cello. This opening immediately establishes a commanding presence, with great rhythmic flexibility, capable of a wide expressive range, eminently suitable for translation from string quartet to string orchestra.