Welcome to the website of David Byers, composer, musicologist, writer and broadcaster.
From this current Home page you can link through to three main blocks of pages and also a Contact me page.
Each of those three main pages offers several options, as outlined below. Please do explore them!
Biography includes additional pages on the New Belmont Consort, the BBC years and the Ulster Orchestra years.
Compositions details music by David Byers, listed by category.
Another page within this section includes many Programme Notes for those works.
Music features index, as that implies, links to many different features on music and musicians and gives a brief resumé about each one.
The listing, below right, provides a shortcut to most of those features.
- Orchestras in Northern Ireland, including the Ulster Orchestra
- Joan Trimble
- Edward Bunting
- 1813 Belfast Music Festival & Handel’s Messiah
- Ulster Hall Organ & 1862 Belfast Musical Festival
- Joy Roger Hammerschlag - My Life of Music*
- Norman Hay, Ulster composer and influential music critic
- Ina Boyle’s String Quartet
- Ina Boyle’s Still falls the Rain
- Ina Boyle’s No coward soul is mine
- Cooking with trad. Irish dance tunes and Wind Quintet
- Pepusch - Organ Voluntary in C
- Pepusch - Motets
- Babell Oboe Sonatas in B flat major - a new edition
- Monnier Harper - a forgotten talent
- Who was Minna Rider (Christmas carol 2017)
- Brian Thompson - composer
*also with a PDF
re Peter Gibbs, violinist and RAF fighter pilot, including his
confrontation with Herbert von Karajan and Gibbs’ death: the Great Mull Air
Mystery.
The Privacy Policy for this website, as required by the EU’s GDPR, is available here.
Website content © 2011 - 2021, David Byers
Last updated 26 February 2021
NEW: See pics and information about the Music Hall in May Street on the page about the
Ulster Hall Organ and the 1862 Belfast Musical Festival; also a PDF about the Victoria
Hall organ, its organists and more (look out for the riot which threatened the organ!).
RECENT: i My new edition of Ina Boyle’s setting of Emily Brontë's No coward soul is mine for contralto (or mezzo) and string orchestra; ii Additions to webpage re my edition of an Oboe Sonata (or two!) by William Babell;
iii. Also added is a PDF article from the Belfast Telegraph in 1946 about Joy Roger
Hammerschlag (included in the feature about her).
