It's time for us to rediscover the work of the late Brian Boydell, writes Michael Dervan

The composer Brian Boydell, who lived from 1917 to 2000, was a man rarely short of a word. In his case the words were usually thoughtful, well rounded and mellifluous.

There was no shortage of words on Tuesday, either, the day Waterford New Music Week spent celebrating his memory.

Boydell was one of the principal figures of music in Ireland during the second half of the 20th century. He didn't just compose. He sang. He was professor of singing at the Royal Irish Academy of Music, and he directed the Dowland Consort in performances of early choral music.

He conducted the Dublin Orchestral Players at a time when that amateur group had - or could be persuaded to have - an interest in music that was contemporary.

During his two decades as professor of music at Trinity College, Dublin, he transformed a part-time activity into a fully fledged music department. He sat on the Arts Council and was a key player in choosing the early members of Aosdána, before it became a self-electing body.

He was an indelible part of the public face of music in Ireland. He wrote a cantata, A Terrible Beauty Is Born, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the 1916 rising.

Tuesday began with a video screening - sadly, only on a low-placed, small domestic television in a well-filled lecture room - of All My Enthusiasms, Anne Makower's RTÉ documentary, which was originally broadcast to celebrate the composer's 80th birthday, in 1997.

Boydell was a man of strong passions, opinions and prejudices. He was, he said, "interested in everything except horse-racing and team games". His concern in music was "honesty and communication" rather than the latest fashion.

And he could be withering about musical trends he disapproved of, from 12-tone music to Stockhausen and electronic music - which, I heard him say once, he explored himself, only to conclude it was a dead end.

Makower's documentary presents many of the paradoxes of the composer's life. His experiences of anti-Irish prejudice at a British public school fired him with nationalist fervour. But the marks of that education opened him up to other sorts of prejudice at home.

He abhorred the idea of composing with a system - the dreaded name here was Schoenberg - but if the analysis presented in Waterford, in a talk by the musicologist Hazel Farrell, is to be accepted at face value, he exploited octatonicism - a scale using alternating whole tones and semitones - with a systematic rigour Schoenberg would have recognised. He disapproved of what he called "plastic shamrock" music, yet I suspect he would have been glad that the Irish characteristics of his best work, a sort of falling Celtic melancholy, are so readily recognisable.

You can hear this trait clearly in that part of his output he treasured the most - as musical performers and audiences continue to do, too - his three string quartets.

The concert performances at Waterford New Music Week were restricted to works or excerpts prepared by individuals in or close to Waterford Institute of Technology. Sadly, none of the quartets was featured. The most memorable performances came at the evening's end.

The communicator in Boydell, who made his best lectures and broadcast talks compelling listening, liked to essay the lighter end of musical composition, fulfilling his vision of the composer as a craftsman who could as readily concentrate on a well-turned trifle as on a major commission.

Malcolm Proud and Eric Sweeney gave an alert account of the piano- duet version of the military band piece Fred's Frolics, a latter-day equivalent of the 19th-century French send-ups of Wagner by Fauré, Messager and Chabrier.

The Frenchmen presented slivers of the solemn master of Bayreuth dressed up as quadrilles. Boydell chose even more popular material to guy. Eric Sweeney played his own BrianBoyDell, the capitalisation divulging the musical cyphering of the piece.

This is a sharp and witty 80th-birthday present that's a lot more carefree than any of Boydell's own humorous undertakings. It was played, as were the duets, on the composer's own Bösendorfer grand, which has been gifted to the institute.

Somehow, the seriousness of music never quite eluded Boydell, even though "serious music" was a description he objected to. It's time now, surely, for those of our national organisations with the necessary resources to give us once again the opportunity to hear some of his major, long-unheard works. For many years, Boydell the campaigner counted and charted the performances of works by Irish composers so that, when he saw shortfalls, he could point his finger at the relevant culprits, usually RTÉ.

There would be nobody quicker to understand the broader implications of the institutional silence that has followed his death. Is anyone listening in Donnybrook or Earlsfort Terrace?