1997 is going to be an eventful year for Brian Boydell. He will celebrate both his eightieth birthday and the release on the Naxos label of a compact disc devoted to his orchestral music. In addition, a live recording made by Royal Danish Brass of his recent work, Viking Lip-Music, specially commissioned for the group's recent tour of Ireland, will be available later this spring. Meanwhile, he is occupied with various other activities close to his heart. For example, our time together in his rambling and beautifully-situated Howth home outside Dublin is limited because of preparations he must make for the evening to come. The Dowland Consort -- the vocal ensemble Boydell formed and directed between 1959 and 1970 -- is coming round for one of its quarterly evenings of dining, conviviality and Renaissance madrigals. He motions to a stack of scores resting on the piano. 'Ensemble vocal music to me is just the tops. And you see,' he adds with a funny mixture of mischief and pride, 'I sit at the end of the table and direct. It's the greatest pleasure I have.'

This last statement appears to have been true for some time, perhaps since 1959. However, it cannot always have been so, since it wasn't until the 1940s that music, and composing in particular, took centre stage in his life. Armed with apocryphal Boydell stories relayed to me by my father, who used to be a neighbour, I ask him up to what point he had been devoted to things other than music? 'I always have been', he replies, with the emphasis on 'always'. 'The standard entry which I suggest for the various biographical dictionaries is that I am interested in everything except team games and horse-racing. Which is more or less accurate. And I take a very intense interest in a great many things. To my mind, that's what makes life worth living.'

And his first love was science. Starting from when he was eight years old, all his pocket money was spent on chemicals and apparatus for a laboratory which he had set up at home. Some of my father's apocryphal stories date from Boydell's period as a DIY scientist. What about the Jaguar whose mid-section he removed so that it would fit into his garage? 'Wildly inaccurate; I never had a Jaguar. It may be something to do with the war period when petrol was rationed and no private cars were allowed on the road unless you were a doctor. But lorries were allowed, so I converted my three-litre Sunbeam into a lorry for delivering charcoal.'

Oh, is that all it was! Except that this lorry never actually delivered the charcoal it carried: it burnt it and ran on producer gas!

Always, alongside his love of science, was a love of music so that when he went to Clare College in Cambridge to study science, it was on a choral scholarship. It wasn't long before he became president of the College Music Society and a lifelong love of madrigals was born once he came into contact with the organist and conductor Boris Ord, then running the Cambridge Madrigal Society. As the depth of this musical involvement deepened, it became clear to Boydell's father, who wanted his only son to join him in his business (making malt for Guinness), that some kind of deal would have to be struck. Accordingly, he offered to pay for a period of study at London's Royal College of Music on condition that Brian first secure a good degree in science. Boydell promptly achieved a First at Cambridge and, in 1938, began studies in voice, oboe and composition at the RCM.

These studies were curtailed one year later by the outbreak of the war. Boydell returned to Dublin where his father gave him a laboratory job measuring moisture levels in wheat, estimating the tint of various kinds of malt, and similar tasks which he found very uninteresting. And yet, though he was itching to get back to music, he accepted his situation and invested his untapped scientific potential in an enthusiastic bout of independent research. This would ultimately precipitate a great turning-point in his life.

'I had a great notion that there were valuable by-products in things that were thrown away from the malt industry, such as malt combings. I was trying to trace various vitamins which might be in these things when an Austrian brewing chemist came to Dublin as a refugee and it was arranged that I should meet him. He listened to what I was doing and said, "What you should do now is spend the next three years in the library where you'll find that all this has already been done".' Boydell laughs heartily at the thought of the bored, deflated young scientist. 'I found that so shattering, that that's what really finished me in science.' It was the turning-point.

Boydell left Guinness's and took a job teaching painting ('I had no qualifications except that I was a "Sunday Painter"') at St Columba's College. At the same time he began to build up a clientele of private singing pupils, one of whom later became his wife. Now happily dividing his time between music and painting -- he received lessons from Mainie Jellett -- Boydell became involved with the White Stag Group, a small gathering of artists associated with the surrealist movement and accused of being 'spies and Communists'. But soon, feeling the need to make an absolute choice for the career ahead of him, he elected to concentrate on music. He hasn't painted since 1944, the year in which his father, though disappointed in his earlier decision to leave science, paid for Boydell to give a recital of his own works in the Shelbourne Hotel. A job teaching singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music soon followed, as did the Radio Éireann Chamber Music Prize in 1949 for his String Quartet No. 1.

By the time George Hewson was ready to retire from the chair of the School of Music in Trinity College, Dublin, a number of people on the inside were encouraging Boydell to succeed him. 'In order to qualify myself for that, I did the horrifying thing -- having already become a reasonably established musician -- of sitting an exam, terrified that I might fail. So I took the Doctorate of Music and luckily passed it. I was sure I was going to fail. That qualified me for the job which I then got in 1962.'

Having found much of the DMus. to be of little relevance, the new professor wasted little time in redesigning it. 'It was nineteenth century. It was based on the idea that every cathedral organist in those days had to have a Doctorate of Music. And it was all based on nineteenth-century church music and organ music and that sort of thing. It was rather like a senior Bachelor of Music: instead of doing four-part harmony you did six-part harmony and it was an entirely dull, academic thing. A most uninspiring exam. So I redesigned it and made it much more realistic as far as music is concerned.'

The same pragmatic approach to the study of music informed his undergraduate teaching in TCD. Past graduates still wax lyrical about how in Boydell's classes they studied Renaissance style by first singing the music before analysing or imitating it.

And a similar pragmatism is at the root of his philosophy of composing. In the 1950s, for example, when the new generation of internationalist Irish composers was beginning to experiment with twelve-note rows and serialism, Boydell was not among them. This is due in part, he explains, to his background in science. 'I believe that music arises from natural sound and is an extension of natural sound. The octave is not divided into twelve equal semitones in any natural way whatever. It's built on the harmonic system which you can't escape. Every single note has a series of harmonics which have a relationship to each other. Sound two notes together and a difference tone is produced which is your bass. And you can't get away from these natural phenomena. The thing, to me, is unnatural. In that way I was much more influenced by Hindemith. His ideas were based on harmonics.'

His views on note-rows and serialism would appear to make a question about electro-acoustic music superfluous. But I ask it anyway and Boydell is more circumspect in his reply. 'It's a very tricky area. I always said to my students every year when they arrived for the first time: every judgment made about the arts tells you more about the person making the judgment than it does about the arts.

'And I know, myself, -- in fact I'm a little bit embarrassed by the fact -- but I know perfectly well that I'm an old fogey now. And that's having been the naughty boy of modern Irish music in the 1950s. I am now definitely rather old-fashioned. But one thing I cling on to is that I still think that the greatest art throughout the centuries has not been made without effort: effort to conquer technique.'

And then effort to conceal the effort, you might say, which characterises his four string quartets (including the recent Adagio and Scherzo). They are works, composed in 1947, 1957, 1969 and 1991, which Boydell is prepared to stand over and which provide an illustration of his views on composition. 'The great thing about string quartets is that they have got to be honest. You can't get away with funny noises. I think that there is a great deal of rather superficial composition: it makes very curious noises and astonishes people while at the same time hiding a lack of real musical thought. Well now, you can't cheat with a string quartet. It's got to be good music or else it just doesn't work.'

With these particular aesthetic convictions it has become increasingly difficult for him to stay abreast of the international contemporary scene. 'I feel rather lost with very contemporary music', he says almost ruefully, before adding, 'Quite frankly, I don't like it. Of course, you can't wrap it all up like that. When I say "it", I'm talking about what I call the "plinkety-plonk" stuff. Stockhausen, that sort of thing.'

And there is, indeed, a great strength of feeling in his response when I incorrectly recollect that it was he who brought Stockhausen to Trinity in the early 1980s. 'I didn't. But he was brought. I remember attending his lecture, which was remarkably arrogant.'

One senses that he rather enjoys the special licence to express opinion which declaring yourself 'an old fogey' can grant. He derives equal pleasure in recounting a story about a friend of his, a former pupil and prominent fellow composer. 'About 1950, he walked out of a performance of a work of mine because it was so modern! And then fifteen years later it was I who couldn't make head or tail of what he was doing when he was fresh back from Germany. But then the funny thing is, as with so many of the arts, that the pendulum has swung with him and he's back, back to things that are ultra-simple. Just as it is in painting, which is beginning to swing back to realism.'

At this stage I suggest that, with his eighty years, his prestigious career in music and his large catalogue of works, he is really the grandfather of Irish contemporary music. It's a suggestion which gives him pause, and he seems not unwilling to accept the responsibility which such a title might entail, but not the honour. This, he believes, belongs to his great friend and colleague, Frederick May (1911-1985). 'In the thirties and forties, this country was very much influenced by what I suppose you could call the de Valera attitude: we must keep out nasty foreign influences and develop this wonderful culture which we have buried in our own people. It was an inward-looking thing. If anybody brought in something from outside they were suspected of being something dreadful. The first person to break that was Mainie Jellett in painting. Freddie May was the first person to do it for music.

'I suppose I can say I was the next one, following along with Freddie May to make music an international language but reflecting our own viewpoint, our own ideas. You didn't eschew the national outlook, but you wrote in a language which was universal. Also Aloys Fleischmann, although he was tottering on the brink for some time!' Boydell laughs before adding with considerable satisfaction, 'but Freddie and I dragged him into our camp!'

He proceeds, then, to enumerate the succession of composers since those early days, just like, I think, a grandfather reciting the inventory of his children and grandchildren. He refers to many, many composers from the 1950s to the present day, singling out Ian Wilson among the new generation of young composers and describing John Buckley as the most important present figure, 'a top-class writer'. As for being a flag-bearer for Irish contemporary music, he feels as though he has been doing it all his life. 'I can't be specific' he says, 'except to say that I think that in Ireland just as good music is being written as in many other places.'

Whether or not 'grandfather' is the correct sobriquet, Brian Boydell is a central figure in the history of Irish contemporary music. Talking with him is like reliving the musical history of our century, while at the same time his own part within that history is so fascinating. As I prepare to leave, he asks me to sign the guest-book. 'There are all kinds of people in that book' he says. 'Shostakovich, for example.'

Lucky me, I think to myself, as I endeavour to give my signature in the neatest possible writing.