THE Hungarian composer Ligeti warns us to beware of ideologies in art; to view with suspicion what he calls 'the blinkers of style and the dictates of modernism'. In his compositions Brian Boydell challenged the current ideology of musical nationalism where composers were expected to make their music sound 'Irish' by a deliberate use of folk song, and he took issue with the rigid modernism prevalent in the 1960s and 1970s which approved only of a cerebral intellectual approach to composition.

Brian was, quite simply, too great a musician to be bound by any such restrictions. I remember him saying that any view expressed about music tells you more about the speaker than it does about the music. His breadth of knowledge, his wide range of interests, musical and extra-musical attests to a true Renaissance man.

All composers hope their music will endure. It has been suggested that the creative instinct is a sublimation of our desire for immortality. Whether this is true or not, I am convinced that Brian's music will endure. He has left us a unique legacy of original, powerfully crafted music. His string quartets in particular stand at the pinnacle of contemporary Irish music and his symphonic works show a rare lyricism and a consummate handling of form and structure.

And yet, he remembered the importance of the amateur in music also. Almost uniquely among contemporary composers he believed that music could be written to entertain and delight as well as to challenge and provoke. Among his many talents Brian was a natural teacher who imparted his wide musical knowledge with enthusiasm and generosity. At a time when much music teaching was based on a textbook approach his lectures were remarkable for their wit, imagination and vision. His enthusiasm for Renaissance music was as infectious as for modern music. As founder of the Dowland Consort he introduced many people for the first time to the wealth of Tudor and Elizabethan music, and his research into music in eighteenth-century Dublin was a major contribution to scholarship.

Brian was a tireless lobbyist for music and, with his life long friend and colleague Aloys Fleischmann, a constant berator of the poor provision for music education in this country. He could, when necessary, be a cunning politician for the many causes of music. Throughout all this he insisted on the highest standards for his art and demanded the same from his students.