Rory Boyle composer / arranger

Born in Ayr, Rory Boyle was a chorister at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor, and studied composition firstly with Frank Spedding at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland), and then with Lennox Berkeley in London. Whilst still a student, he won the BBC Scottish Composers’ Prize with his first orchestral score and in 1987 he won the Zaiks Prize, set up in memory of the Polish composer Kazimierz Zerocki, for another orchestral score Winter Music. In 1998 The National Youth Orchestra of Scotland’s tour programme included his Capriccio which was performed at venues including the London Proms. 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 its 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”. His list of works covers most genres and he has also written extensively for younger players. He has received 3 nominations at the annual British Composers Awards, with his opera, Kaspar Hauser, Child of Europe, performed in Scotland and Germany to critical acclaim, winning the stage works category in 2010. He lives in Ayrshire and divides his time between composing and teaching at the The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where he is a Professor of Composition.