Dr Brian Boydell, who died on November 8th aged 83, was among the most distinguished Irish composers of his time, an eminent educator, a music activist of vigour, and a leading Irish musicologist, specialising in the performance and social context of music in Dublin in the 18th century. Brian Patrick Boydell was born on March 17th, 1917, into a well-known family of maltsters. He was educated at Rugby and Cambridge, where he studied natural sciences, and subsequently pursued musical studies at Heidelberg and at the Royal College of Music (under Vaughan Williams).
On his return to Dublin, he worked briefly in the family firm before teaching art and science at St Columba's College and singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music (RIAM) from 1944 to 1948.
Awarded a doctorate in music by Dublin University in 1959, he held the Chair of Music at TCD for 20 years from 1962, retiring as Fellow Emeritus. Concurrently, he was conductor of the Dublin Orchestral Players and for many years a member of the Arts Council as well as founding and directing the Dowland Consort for the performance of Renaissance music.
Apart from his very appealing teaching manner, he transformed the university music syllabus, making the degree course internal and enabling students to take music as part of a joint honours course.
This full-time involvement with education might have arrested his work as a composer, but it did not. From his earliest mature works such as the cello sonata (1945) and In Memoriam Mahatma Gandhi (1948), he became rapidly noted for the breadth, vision and integrity of his work.
He said: "In the 1940s and 1950s I was considered a very `modern' composer. Now my music could possibly be considered rather old-fashioned. This is largely due to a belief in artistic honesty: creating sounds that I like personally and refusing to follow fashions that might be more acceptable to critics of the time."
His most important works include three string quartets: Megalithic Ritual Dances (recorded by the then RTE Symphony Orchestra under Milan Horvat in 1956), Symphonic Inscapes (also recorded by the RTESO under Albert Rosen in 1969), Richard's Riot, a work for the virtuoso percussionist Richard Callinan, and Mouth Music (1974) for the RTE Singers.
His violin concerto, written for Jaroslav Vanecek in 1953 (and revised in 1954), is one of the most important Irish works of this century.
Brian Boydell's simultaneous engagement with his own country and with the wider world was evident in everything he wrote. Although he only once specifically employed an Irish theme, much of his work has a distinctively Irish character, and many of his minor works - especially his incidental music for plays and small-scale vocal and choral pieces - were tailored to Irish material and Irish needs.
For the 50th anniversary commemoration of the 1916 Rising, he wrote the cantata A Terrible Beauty is Born.
Brian Boydell's Anglo-Irish background and eccentric personality lent him an air of old-world hauteur which may have obscured the depth of his engagement with the social aspects of music-making. However, anyone who experienced the warmth of his communications on practically any subject - from motor racing to the fine arts and the craft of composing - could not fail to appreciate the guileless flair and enthusiasm with which he debated, directed or demonstrated the subject in hand.
Above all, Brian Boydell was set apart from most people as an obvious artist - his bearing, his conversation, his inflection were palpable signs of a man not only deeply cultured, but also immersed in the ways of creativity from both a technical and a passionate orientation.
In his painting, too, he struck a unique sense of direction, exhibiting surrealistic pictures in the 1940s with the White Stag group of English expatriates who attracted the sympathies of pacifists, including Thurloe Conolly and Ralph Cusack (the dedicatee of at least two of Brian Boydell's early works).
His publications include A Dublin Musical Calendar 1700-1760 and its successor Rotunda Music in Eighteenth-Century Dublin - works which widened and deepened our appreciation of musical performances and their context: who played, what they played, who managed the concerts and who constituted the audiences.
Brian Boydell was honoured by the National University of Ireland (D.Mus), by the RIAM (fellowship) and by the Italian government (Commendatore of the Order of Merit of the Italian Republic). He was made a member of Aosdana in 1984.
He is survived by wife Mary, and sons, Cormac and Barra, and two sisters, Yvonne and Valda. A third son, Marnac, predeceased him.
Dr Brian Boydell: born 1917; died, November 2000