Between 1959 and 1977, Trimble is professor of accompaniment and musicianship at the Royal College of Music.
Trimble’s compositional career spans two decades, producing works such as Buttermilk Point (1938), The Heather Glen (1949), Phantasy for Piano Trio (1940), and the suite Ulster Airs (1939–40). In 1957, she makes a notable mark by composing Blind Raftery, the first new opera by a woman to be broadcast on BBC Television.
Later in life, Trimble inherits her father’s newspaper, becoming its proprietor and editor, and takes up composition again in 1990 when commissioned for her 75th birthday. She dies in Enniskillen on August 6, 2000, at the age of 85, two weeks after the death of her husband. She is remembered for her contributions to Irish music, her skill as a pianist, and her role in preserving her family’s legacy in both the arts and journalism.
In 2002, the Joan Trimble Awards Scheme is established by her family in her memory, and administered by the Fermanagh Trust “in recognition of her lifelong commitment to County Fermanagh.” The purpose of the scheme is to encourage and support the involvement of young people in creativity, the performing arts and Irish culture, and to provide bursaries for training and education.
In 2012, Fermanagh County Museum stages an exhibition titled “Buttermilk Point: The Musical Life of Joan Trimble, 1915–2000.”
On June 18, 2015, “Music in Fermanagh” presents A Celebration Concert as part of the Joan Trimble Centenary Celebration at the Ardhowen Theatre in Enniskillen.
Described as having an “ardent and self-confident manner,” Hughes is first heard of in an Irish musical capacity (beyond being honorary organist at St. Peter’s Church on Antrim Road at the age of fourteen) collecting traditional airs and transcribing folksongs in North Donegal in August 1903 with his brother Fred, Francis Joseph Bigger, and John Patrick Campbell. Dedicated to seeking out and recording such ancient melodies as are yet to be found in the more remote glens and valleys of Ulster, he produces Songs of Uladh (1904) with Joseph Campbell, illustrated by his brother John and paid for by Bigger. Throughout his career, he collects and arranges hundreds of traditional melodies and publishes many of them in his own unique arrangements. Three of his best-known works are the celebrated songs, My Lagan Love, She Moved Through the Fair, and Down by the Salley Gardens, which are published as part of his four collections of Irish Country Songs, his key achievement. These are written in collaborations with the poets Joseph Campbell and Padraic Colum, and W. B. Yeats himself. A dispute with Hamilton Harty over copyright on My Lagan Love is pursued on Bigger’s advice, but fails.
Hughes has a unique approach to arranging Irish traditional music. He calls upon the influence of the French impressionistClaude Debussy in his approach to harmony: “Musical art is gradually releasing itself from the tyranny of the tempered scale. […] and if we examine the work of the modern French school, notably that of M. Claude Debussy, it will be seen that the tendency is to break the bonds of this old slave-driver and return to the freedom of primitive scales.” He regards arrangements as an independent art form on an equal level with original composition: “[…] under his [i.e. the arranger’s] hands it is definitively transmuted into an art-song, an art-song of its own generation.” His folksong arrangements have been sung all across the English-speaking world. John McCormack and Kathleen Ferrier are the first to record them on gramophone records.
Hughes also composes a limited amount of original chamber music (a violin sonata is mentioned in a letter to Hughes from Bernard van Dieren dated April 4, 1932), and some scores for the stage (like And So to Bed by James Bernard Fagan) and film. Hughes and John Robert Monsell also create songs for a musical version of Richard Brinsley Sheridan‘s The Rivals called Rivals!, which is staged at the Kingsway Theatre in London in October 1935 by Vladimir Rosing and runs for 86 performances.
Married to Lillian Florence (known as Meena) Meacham and Suzanne McKernan, Hughes has three children: Patrick, known professionally as Spike Hughes, Angela and Helena. He dies in Brighton, England, at the relatively early age of fifty-four on May 1, 1937.
Brian Patrick Boydell, Irish composer whose works include orchestral pieces, chamber music, and songs, dies on November 8, 2000. He is Professor of Music at Trinity College Dublin for 20 years, founder of the Dowland Consort, conductor of the Dublin Orchestral Players, and a prolific broadcaster and writer on musical matters. He was also a prolific musicologist specialising in 18th-century Irish musical history.
Boydell is born on March 17, 1917, in Howth, County Dublin, into a prosperous Anglo-Irish family. His father James runs the family maltings business while his mother, Eileen Collins, is one of the first women graduates of Trinity College. Following their son’s birth, the Boydells move from Howth and live in a succession of rented houses before settling in Shankill, County Dublin. The young Boydell begins his formal education at Monkstown Park in Dublin and is subsequently sent to the Dragon School at Oxford, England. From there he goes to Rugby School, where he comes under the influence of Kenneth Stubbs, the music master. Although he later speaks of his resentment at the anti-Irish attitude he experiences at Rugby, he appreciates the very good education in science and music he receives there.
Having completed his secondary education, Boydell spends the summer of 1935 developing his musical knowledge at Heidelberg, Germany, where he writes his first songs and also studies organ. He wins a choral scholarship to Clare College, Cambridge, where, perhaps through parental pressure, he studies natural science, graduating in 1938 with a first-class degree.
Upon the outbreak of World War II, Boydell returns to Dublin and achieves further academic success in 1942 with a Bachelor of Music degree from Trinity College. He also takes further lessons in composition from John F. Larchet.
Boydell’s busy working life combines teaching, performing and composing. Following a brief stint in his father’s business, he plunges himself into Dublin’s classical music scene. In 1943, he succeeds Havelock Nelson as conductor of the Dublin Orchestral Players, beginning an association with the amateur orchestra that endures for a quarter of a century (until 1966). In 1944, he is appointed Professor of Singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, a position he holds for eight years. Along with fellow composers Edgar M. Deale, Aloys Fleischmann, and Frederick May he founds the Music Association of Ireland in 1948 as a vehicle to promote classical music throughout the country.
Boydell’s interest in Renaissance music, in particular the madrigal, leads in 1959 to founding the Dowland Consort, a vocal ensemble with which he performs for many years and records an LP. In 1962, having obtained a Doctorate in Music, he is appointed Professor of Music at Trinity College, a position he holds until 1982. He immediately revamps the course making it more relevant to the second half of the twentieth century. He also finds time to sit on the Arts Council throughout the 1960s, 70s, and early 80s.
Boydell’s communication skills combined with his infectious enthusiasm makes him a natural broadcaster. The appeal of his programmes on the history and performance of music, first on RTÉ Radio 1 and later on Telefís Éireann, go beyond a specialist audience and are, for many people, their introduction to a new world of aural pleasure.
Boydell has many interests beyond music. As a surrealist painter in the 1940s, having taken lessons from Mainie Jellett, he is a member of The White Stag Group. He is also passionate about cars and photography.
Following retirement from Trinity as Fellow Emeritus, Boydell devotes himself to musical scholarship, writing two books on the music of 18th century Dublin. He also contributes to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Boydell dies at his home in Howth on November 8, 2000, at the age of 83 and in the company of his wife of 56 years, Mary (née Jones) and their sons, Cormac and Barra. A third son, Marnac, predeceases him.
Boydell is awarded several honorary titles in recognition of his services to music, including the Honorary Doctorate of Music from the National University of Ireland (1974), the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic (1983), the election to Aosdána, Ireland’s academy of creative artists (1984), and Honorary Fellowship of the Royal Irish Academy of Music (1990).
Wood is the fifth child and third son of Charles Wood, Sr. and Jemima Wood. He is a treble chorister in the choir of the nearby St. Patrick’s Cathedral. His father sings tenor as a stipendiary “Gentleman” or “Lay Vicar Choral” in the Cathedral choir and is also the Diocesan Registrar of the church. He is a cousin of Irish composer Ina Boyle.
Wood receives his early education at the Cathedral Choir School and also studies organ with two Organists and Masters of the Boys of Armagh Cathedral, Robert Turle and his successor Dr. Thomas Marks. In 1883 he becomes one of fifty inaugural class members of the Royal College of Music, studying composition with Charles Villiers Stanford and Charles Hubert Hastings Parry primarily, and horn and piano secondarily. Following four years of training, he continues his studies at Selwyn College, Cambridge through 1889, where he begins teaching harmony and counterpoint.
In 1889 he attains a teaching position at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, first as organ scholar and then as fellow in 1894, becoming the first Director of Music and Organist. He is instrumental in the reflowering of music at the college, though more as a teacher and organiser of musical events than as composer. After Stanford dies in 1924, Wood assumes his mentor’s vacant role as Professor of Music in the University of Cambridge.
Like his better-known colleague Stanford, Wood is chiefly remembered for his Anglican church music. As well as his Communion Service in the Phrygian mode, his settings of the Magnificat and Nunc dimittis are still popular with cathedral and parish church choirs, particularly the services in F, D, and G, and the two settings in E flat. During Passiontide his St. Mark Passion is sometimes performed, and demonstrates Wood’s interest in modal composition, in contrast to the late romantic harmonic style he more usually employs.
Wood’s anthems with organ, Expectans expectavi, and O Thou, the Central Orb are both frequently performed and recorded, as are his unaccompanied anthems Tis the day of Resurrection, Glory and Honour and, most popular of all, Hail, gladdening light and its lesser-known equivalent for men’s voices, Great Lord of Lords. All of Wood’s a cappella music demonstrates fastidious craftsmanship and a supreme mastery of the genre, and he is no less resourceful in his accompanied choral works which sometimes include unison sections and have stirring organ accompaniments, conveying a satisfying warmth and richness of emotional expression appropriate to his carefully chosen texts.
Wood collaborates with priest and poet George Ratcliffe Woodward in the revival and popularisation of renaissance tunes to new English religious texts, notably co-editing three books of carols. He also writes eight string quartets, and is co-founder of the Irish Folk Song Society in 1904.
He marries Charlotte Georgina Wills-Sandford, daughter of W. R. Wills-Sandford, of Castlerea, County Roscommon on March 17, 1898. Their son is killed in World War I.
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