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Born Ayr. He received his earliest musical education as a chorister at St George's Chapel, Windsor. He studied composition with Dr Frank Spedding at the Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama as well as piano, clarinet, organ and conducting. A Caird travelling scholarship enabled him to continue his studies with Lennox Berkeley in London.
Whilst he was still a student at the RSAMD, he won the BBC Scottish Composer's Prize. His list of works, covering most genres from symphonies to incidental music for television, demonstrates considerable versatility and he has received commissions from many societies, festivals and organizations.
He has not neglected the educational sphere, including writing four operas for children (Augustine, Alfege, Sunstrike and The Ghost of Hamish Prong), and several of his works have been used for education projects including Medicine Music and Night Pictures. In 1998 the National Youth Orchestra of Scotland's tour programme included Boyle's Capriccio which was performed at venues including the Concertgebauw, Amsterdam, and the London Proms. In the Proms programme, the conductor Nicholas Cleobury wrote, 'While Boyle's Scottish roots are never far away, his music has a strong, mainstream European, Stravinsky-based rigour, with his own brand of virile, challenging, but always comprehensible counterpoint, dissonance which is hard-fought yet never gratuitous, an unsentimental lyricism and unerring sense of architecture. He chose his teachers well: Spedding encouraged his individual voice: Berkeley reduced wastage and honed his orchestration.'
His music is performed and broadcast widely both in Britain and abroad and several works have been recorded on CD including the piano pieces Moduli played by Peter Seivewright (who also premiered Boyle's Piano Concerto), Lament, Capriccio, Campani in Aria, and Cinderella. In 2003 he took up a three year appointment as the Scottish Chamber Orchestra's Composer Laureate for Schools. He lives in South Ayrshire.
In 2006 he won a Creative Scotland award towards his production of an opera based on the life a feral German boy.
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