Rory Boyle

Professional

• Composer/Lyricist: Composer
• Genre: Concert
• Email: roryboyle@onetel.com

Biography

The Scottish composer Rory Boyle was born in Ayr in 1951 and received his earliest musical education as a chorister at St George's Chapel Windsor. He studied composition with Dr Frank Spedding at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as well as piano, clarinet, organ and conducting. A travelling scholarship enabled him to continue his studies with Lennox Berkeley in London.

Boyle has won several important awards, notably the BBC SCOTTISH COMPOSERS' PRIZE (1971) for orchestral Variations on a theme of Orlando Gibbons, ROYAL PHILHARMONIC PRIZES (1973 and 1975) for Symphony in one movement and Clarinet Concerto respectively, and, in 1987, the ZIAKS PRIZE in the Polish International Competition "KAZIMIERZ SEROCKI" for his orchestral score Winter Music.

His list of over 150 compositions demonstrates his considerable versatility. He has received commissions from many societies, festivals and organisations including the Cheltenham, Three Choirs', St Albans International, Greenwich and Latvian Contemporary Music Festivals, the Bournemouth Sinfonietta, Schola Cantorum Oxford, the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland and the Bochmann String Quartet.

He has also written for leading international performers including Evelyn Glennie, Peter Seivewright, the Fine Arts Brass Quintet and the Haffner Ensemble.

His list of works covers most genres from large orchestral scores to incidental music for television. He has not neglected the educational sphere, including four operas for children and several works used for education projects including CINDERELLA with the Britten Sinfonia and MEDICINE MUSIC with the Bournemouth Sinfonietta. Richard McNicol has also toured with several of Boyle's scores including NIGHT MUSIC with the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and the Northern Sinfonia. In 1994 he was the featured composer at the Aberystwyth International MusicFest.

In 1998 the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland's tour included Boyle's CAPRICCIO which was given performances at venues including the Concertgebouw, Amsterdam and the London Proms. The work has subsequently been recorded on the orchestra's most recent CD with the leading Japanese conductor Junichi Hirokami. In the Proms programme, the conductor Nicholas Cleobury wrote, "While Boyle's Scottish roots are never far away, his music has a strong, mainstream European, Stravinsky-based rigour, with his own brand of virile, challenging, but always comprehensible counterpoint, dissonance which is hard- fought yet never gratuitous, an unsentimental lyricism and unerring sense of architecture".