Cork choral festival to taste composer Timothy Doyle's recipe for success
Timothy Doyle worked in well-known food ventures including Good Day Deli and The Rocket Man before venturing into choral composition.
Winning the prestigious Seán Ó Riada composition competition has come at an opportune time for Timothy Doyle. When he arrived in Cork to study composition at UCC in 2015, he also took the opportunity to add another string to his bow.
Working in various cafés in the city gave him a taste for the culinary life, eventually leading him to the French city of Lyon where he ran his own vegan café for a number of years. Music took something of a back seat but now he has sold up and is turning his attention to composing full-time.
Doyle won the annual Seán Ó Riada competition, which celebrates new works from Irish composers, with his piece based on a poem by Aldous Huxley. It will be performed for the first time by Chamber Choir Ireland as part of the upcoming Cork International Choral Festival.
It is Doyle’s first major choral piece, having previously focused on composing chamber, orchestral and electronic music works, for which he has won numerous awards.
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He completed a degree in jazz performance and composition at Newpark Academy of Music in his native Dublin before moving to New York in 2013, later returning to Ireland, where he juggled his studies at UCC with working in well-known food ventures including Good Day Deli and The Rocket Man.
Doyle first ventured into choral composition in 2023, when he was mentored by renowned Irish composer Rhona Clarke (a previous winner of the Seán Ó Riada competition) as part of the Contemporary Music Centre’s Choral Sketches development programme.
“That was the first time I had written a choral piece and it gave me the confidence to write a bit more,” says Doyle.
He found the relative constraints of creating a four-part choral piece a challenge in comparison to composing electronic and orchestral music.
“When I was younger, I always thought of choral music as a simpler medium. It is absolutely not, it is a whole other world. Dealing with text has its own complications. But with only four lines, you can’t divide things up; writing something with such strict limitations is a lot harder than just being able to do what you want.”
The poem that inspired the piece is a philosophical meditation replete with celestial imagery and it had a lingering impact on Doyle.
“I don’t know where I came across but it stuck in my head because the imagery was so suggestive and it had this almost existential unresolved question in it.
"So much of composing is pre-composition. I had the poem in the back of my head for a couple of years, so by the time I started writing it, it was very quick as I already had an idea of what it was going to be.”
Composing the piece also gave Doyle the chance to mark a momentous family event, so is dedicated to his infant nephew Matteo.
“When I was writing it, my twin brother’s partner was pregnant with Matteo. It is a lovely thing in art and music to be able to do dedications and I had never done it before; if he is ever interested in music, it might be a nice thing for him.”
Doyle is currently living in Andalusia with his girlfriend and is relishing having more time to devote to music.
“Running the café was very time-consuming; now I can spend a lot more time and energy on composition. My goal is to put all my effort into doing it full-time; I have been writing a ton while here.”
He says, however, that he enjoyed mixing music with his culinary pursuits and that being a full-time composer was something he had never really considered before, citing one of his multi-tasking musical heroes.
“I always liked the idea of doing something else parallel to music. The first composer that made an impression on me was Philip Glass and I found his whole story really inspiring — driving a taxi and working in furniture removal. That model suited me better than teaching or anything like that.”
Doyle is looking forward to being back in Cork for the performance of his piece and visiting some of his old haunts.
“Being in UCC was fantastic but my favourite thing about living in Cork was the city itself. I have barely been back so it is great to have an excuse to spend a weekend in Cork, I can’t wait.”
- will have its world premiere performance at the Cathedral of St Mary and St Anne (North Cathedral) on Friday, May 1 at 7.30pm, as part of this year’s Cork International Choral Festival, which runs from April 29 - May 3. corkchoral.ie
