Rory Boyle

Rory Boyle is a Scottish composer and currently Professor of Composition at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland Early life and education Boyle was born in Ayr, Scotland on 9 March 1951. His father was a Major in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders and his mother a very talented amateur pianist and accordionist. His parents separated when he was 5 years old, and he and his sister were brought up by their mother, firstly in Edinburgh and then on a farm in Stirlingshire. He was a chorister at St. George’s Chapel, Windsor and then won a music bursary to Eton College. Career Encouraged by his music teacher Boyle studied composition with Frank Spedding at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama (now The Royal Conservatoire of Scotland). He also studied piano (with Lawrence Glover), organ (with George McPhee) and harpsichord (with Andrew Davis who, at the time, was associate conductor of the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra) during his studies there. He then went on to win a Caird Scholarship to study privately with Lennox Berkeley in London. As the conductor Nicholas Cleobury wrote in the 1998 Proms programme, “Boyle chose his teachers well: Spedding encouraged his individual voic