Welcome to the official website of the Ina Boyle Society Limited, a newly registered charity. Established in 2020, the IBSL’s mission is to advance public education and appreciation of the life and works of Ina Boyle and other neglected Irish composers, particularly women, whose music deserves to be heard more widely.

The Ina Boyle Society Ltd. works closely with Irish and British cultural and academic organisations to deliver Anglo-Irish partnerships in fulfilling its mission. The IBSL was founded by Katie Rowan, a relative of the Boyle family.

As of March 2026, Faber Music has entered a new publishing agreement with the estate of Ina Boyle, representing over 80 of her works. All enquiries to promotion@fabermusic.com

To view a list of works and see which ones are available in typeset format, please see the Music Catalogue section of this site.

The IBSL Board of Directors are grateful for the support of: the late Revd Canon Bob Reed, Precentor of St Patrick’s Cathedral Dublin; Roy Stanley, Music librarian Trinity College Dublin; Contemporary Music Centre, Ireland; Dr. Orla Shannon (funded by the Irish Research Council); David Scott; The Ambache Trust; The Ralph Vaughan Williams Trust; Iain Burnside; The Wigmore Hall; Michael Barton BSc BFP FCA.

Our Patrons

PRESIDENT

KATIE ROWAN (Founder & President) is a relative of the Boyle family. Originally studied singing with Elizabeth Downey in Waterford.  In a career of thirty years in the charitable sector, including developing music and art opportunities for people with special needs.  Project partners included, Institute of Education London University, Royal College of Art, City Literary Institute (London), Royal Academy, and BBC (Songs of Praise).  On retirement she has taken an active part in supporting young musicians and composers through organisations such Help Musicians UK and Irish Heritage, of which she was Joint Artistic Director.  She is a research associate of the Research Foundation of Music In Ireland. 

TRUSTEES & DIRECTORS

DR MICHAEL BOYLE (Chair) is a composer, educator, and researcher, and a relative of Ina Boyle. He read for his MPhil at the University of Cambridge and received his PhD from the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. He is currently Teaching Fellow in Music Technology at the University of Leeds, Associate Lecturer at the Open University, and is a founding Committee Member of the Royal Musical Association Composer-Performer Collaboration Study Group. As well as ongoing compositional projects and teaching, he is pursuing research into the musical imagination and the relationship between composer, technology, and performer.

EMMA COULTHARD studied Flute and Recorder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music with Doris Keogh, and Musicology at Trinity College Dublin. Emma took a keen interest in contemporary music from early in her career, collaborating with Irish Composers including John Buckley, Martin O’Leary and Paul Hayes in the early 1990s. Emma was the soloist for Paul Hayes’s Prix Italia piece ‘Mass Production” and as a singer worked with Michael Holohan on settings of Seamus Heaney poems.

In 2018, whilst living in Wales Emma returned to her work with Irish Composers, commissioning and premiering several new works which led to performances in Tokyo, Sofia, Cardiff, Dublin, London, Oxford and Maynooth. In 2022 she was been part of Benjamin Dwyer’s SacrumProfanum project which has been released on Farpoint records, and in 2023 released a CD featuring the music of John Buckley. She has been broadcast on BBC and RTE radio and television and has been published by Music Sales and Trinity. She currently lives in Oxfordshire, where she heads the County Music Service.

MAURICE WREN Maurice worked extensively in the refugee protection and homelessness fields for many years, with a range of senior leadership roles at Shelter, HACT, Asylum Aid and the British Refugee Council, where he was Chief Executive from 2012 until his retirement in 2020. Maurice is presently a Trustee of the NGOs Migrant Voice and the European Network on Statelessness, having previously chaired the Governing Boards of Innisfree Housing Association and his local primary school in Hackney. He was made a Patron of the charity Action Foundation in 2016 and was awarded an Honorary Doctorate by the University of Edinburgh in 2017 in recognition of his humanitarian work with refugees. He is a keen amateur musician and presently sings with the chamber choir Londinium.

DR NICOLE GRIMES is the Associate Professor and Head of Music at Trinity College Dublin. She is deeply engaged in recovering and reinterpreting the music of women composers who have been excluded from the historical canon — a commitment that informs both her teaching and her research.

Her work explores the intersections of music, literature, and philosophy, with particular emphasis on the intellectual and aesthetic traditions that have shaped Western music from the late eighteenth century to the present. In July 2025, Grimes was the recipient of the Anthony Pople Award of the Society for Music Analysis for groundbreaking research at the intersection between German music criticism, analysis and aesthetics from the late eighteenth century to the present.

FIACHRA GARVEY is a Wicklow-born pianist, first prize-winner at the 2012 Jaques Samuel Competition, London, and prize-winner at AXA Dublin International Piano Competition, EU Prague and the Soirees-Concours Internationales de Piano a Collioure, France. The NCH awarded Fiachra the “Rising Star” prize in 2011, which subsequently led to a series of concerto and solo debuts. 

Fiachra has performed in venues from the Fazioli Auditorium to Wigmore Hall. Concerto appearances include the Janáček Philharmonic, National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, RTÉ Concert Orchestra, Irish Chamber Orchestra, Cambridge Symphony Orchestra, UCD Symphony Orchestra, RIAM Symphony Orchestra and the Hibernian Orchestra; working with eminent conductors including John Wilson, Theodore Kuchar, Stephen Bell, Mihhail Gerts, Ruth Reinhardt and Duncan Ward to name a few.  Fiachra has recorded and broadcast for the BBC, RTÉ and the EBU and has released two solo albums, “For the Piano” (RTE Lyric fm label) and a Live from Wigmore Hall disc. As a keen entrepreneur Fiachra is the Founder and Artistic Director of both the West Wicklow Chamber Music Festival and Classical Vauxhall.

ROY STANLEY was Music Librarian at the Library of Trinity College Dublin for over 35 years. In that role he facilitated access to Ina Boyle’s music manuscripts and arranged to have many of them digitised and made available for download through the Library’s Digital Collections platform [https://digitalcollections.tcd.ie/].

He also curated several exhibitions in the Long Room in which items from the Ina Boyle collection were displayed. Roy was elected an honorary member of the International Association of Music Libraries (UK & Ireland Branch) in 2012, and has been actively involved in its committees since 2002. He has published extensively on aspects of TCD’s music collections, and continues to contribute data on Irish holdings to the RISM international database of musical sources [https://rism.info/] 

DR KERRY HOUSTON received early musical education as a boy chorister in Saint Patrick’s Cathedral in Dublin where he sang at the twice daily liturgies. He took his undergraduate and doctoral degrees in music at Trinity College Dublin and his master’s degree in theology at the Pontifical University at Maynooth.

He has held teaching positions in the music departments at Trinity College Dublin, the Royal Irish Academy of Music and Maynooth University. He was Head of the Department of Academic Studies at the TU Dublin Conservatoire for 20 years and is a former President of the Society for Musicology in Ireland. He has presented papers at many national and international conferences and his publications focus on music in Ireland in historical, social and theological contexts. Kerry is Precentor and Director of Chapel Music at Trinity College Dublin where he was recently elected an Honorary Fellow.

TREASURER

MAURICE WREN is Ina Boyle Society’s Treasurer.

COORDINATOR

RÓISÍN JONES is Ina Boyle Society’s Coordinator.

ARTISTIC Advisory Committee

PROFESSOR NICOLA LeFANU (patron) is a well known composer whose works have been widely played, broadcast and recorded. Commission include BBC, festivals in UK and internationally. She is active as a teacher, composer and director,  Emeritus Professor of Music York University(UK)  1994 -2008, and Director of Irish Composition Summer School. Recent premieres included ‘Tokaido Road - a journey after Hiroshige’(music theatre) and ‘Threnody’ for orchestra.  She is daughter of composer Elizabeth Maconchy, long term friend of Ina Boyle. 

IAN FOX is a distinguished writer, music critic and broadcaster.  He wrote his first criticism for the Irish Times in 1969 and has been music critic of Sunday Tribune since 1988. He is Irish correspondent for Opera (London) and Opera Canada and is a member of the Critics Circle London. He founded and edited the first Irish classical music magazine ‘Counterpoint‘, in 1969. He is a Governor of the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and a Council member of Wexford Festival Opera.

DAVID BYERS is a distinguished composer, writer, musicologist and broadcaster, former BBC producer for Music and Arts, and former Chief Executive, Ulster Orchestra.  Has served on many committees and boards: Arts Council Northern Ireland, the Irish Arts Council, Opera Northern Ireland, Ulster Orchestra Society, Irish Baroque Orchestra, Wexford Festival Opera, Royal Irish Academy of Music and National Concert Hall (Dublin).  He has edited and typeset Ina Boyle’s String Quartet and ‘Still Falls the Rain’ for contralto and string quartet.

KENNETH BAIRD is the European Opera Centre's founding chief executive. He was previously the senior executive of the Aldeburgh Foundation - responsible for the Aldeburgh Festival, the programme at Snape Maltings Concert Hall and the Britten-Pears School for Advanced Musical Studies; and subsequently Music Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain. He sits on a number of arts boards including Birmingham Contemporary Music Group.

DR EMMA O’KEEFFE is a recent graduate from TU Dublin Conservatoire. Her thesis, ‘No Coward Soul is Mine’: A Critical Edition of Select Works by Ina Boyle (1889–1967), focuses exclusively on the music of Ina Boyle through creating authoritative critical editions of five digitally typeset works by Ina Boyle composed between 1913 and 1958.  To date, Emma’s critical editions have resulted in a number of world premiere performances and recordings of Boyle’s music including contributions to the albums Cello Abbey (2016) and Ina Boyle (2018), the first CD dedicated entirely to the composer’s orchestral works. Emma has been an advisory member of the Ina Boyle Society since 2015 where she was mentored by the late Dr Ita Beausang. Emma's editions aim to contribute to the reestablishment of Ina Boyle’s once overlooked place in the landscape of twentieth-century Irish art music, and to further build upon Dr Beausang’s life-long research.

DR KERRY HOUSTON Please see his full biography under the Board of Trustees section.