Early Life
Anne Boyd was born in Sydney to James Boyd and Annie Freda Deason Boyd (née Osborn).
Her father died when she was age 3, and her mother sent her to live with relatives on a sheep station (Maneroo) near Longreach, in central Queensland. This intimate experience with the Australian landscape – its expansiveness, its dramatic changes, and its "indescribable energy" – had a profound influence on her future as a composer. She began composing while still at Maneroo, at the age of eight, for the resources she had available: recorder and voice. She moved to Canberra aged 11, and although she was pleased to be reunited with her mother, she missed the beauty of the Outback terrain.
In New South Wales, she received her education at Albury High School and Hornsby Girls' High School.
Boyd studied music at the University of Sydney, where she was one of Peter Sculthorpe's first students. Sculthorpe had a profound influence on her; she said that his music was the first time she had heard music which expressed her experience of the Australian landscape. (In the early 1970s she and Sculthorpe were engaged to be married, but they broke the engagement as they believed one composer in a household was enough.) After receiving her Bachelor of Arts (Honours) degree, she received a PhD in composition from the University of York in England.
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