Ina Boyle: Psalm for cello and orchestra (1927 rev. 1928)

Praying without words – music is capable of this too, when listened to in the right way. If freedom is to be possible, then, according to Kant, knowledge (including talk of God) must be limited and cannot claim to be the ultimate authority for our actions. But when we realise that the world is not as it ought to be in terms of freedom and responsibility, we need the beauty found in nature and culture that inspires trust, so that we may hold fast to hope in the face of despair. Hope is then the motive that leads us to believe that good will prevail. Experiencing beauty is a form of prayer without words.

Whether such thoughts are comprehensible can be subjectively assessed through a composition by Ina Boyle entitled Psalm. This work by Ina Boyle, who played the cello herself, certainly expresses – as one might say today – a personal religious longing for spirituality. There is no written evidence to prove what Ina Boyle had in mind when she titled this cello solo piece ‘Psalm’. There is no explanation from her as to whether she was thinking of a specific psalm from the Bible, or whether by the Greek word psalmos she generally meant a poem set to music or even a song with string accompaniment (Hebrew mizmor) (in Boyle’s case, it would be cello and harp!).

Ina Boyle herself describes how she presented her composition ‘Psalm’ to her famous composition teacher Ralph Vaughan Williams in class in 1928. As her nervousness suggests, her composition dealt with something highly personal, something very important to her:

I took the cello and Dr V.W. was most kind and said ‘I can’t play these things,
but you know I will do my best’ and got me a music stand which he said was
very old and would fall down if it was looked at. But I was so deadly nervous
that I could hardly play a note, everything was out of tune and time, it was a
perfect nightmare. I think Dr V.W. was aghast, but he was gentle and patient
beyond words and did everything to make it easy for me. He never said a word
about its being out of tune, though it must have been agonising, he only said,
‘you are not always playing what you have written’ and ‘I think from always
being alone you have got into the habit of shortening long notes’, ‘you ought
to play with a metronome sometimes and test the things you write by it to see
whether you have written what you really want’. He then went over it again bit
by bit, altering anything that seemed necessary. At the end he said, ‘It does
hang together better than I thought, I daresay it would be effective if well
played’. I felt so dreadfully sorry to have gone so utterly to pieces and have
asked him to listen to such a thing, yet in a way it was one of the most helpful
lessons I ever had, and I never felt more grateful to anyone than I did for the
consideration and sympathy he showed about it.

This diary entry bears witness to the extent to which Ina Boyle struggled with this music – and not merely with the technical aspects of playing the cello. It is all the more regrettable, then, that the work was never performed during her lifetime.
What is clear, however, is that this composition was about something deeper and more intimate, which she sought to do justice to through her music. Listening to this psalm can evoke personal associations and become ‘spiritual’ music for every listener: a prayer without words in the truest sense.

Listen here!

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