🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually experienced the weight of her parent’s heritage. Being the child of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known UK composers of the 1900s, Avril’s name was cloaked in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these memories as I prepared to record the world premiere recording of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring intense musical themes, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, her composition will grant audiences deep understanding into how she – a wartime composer born in 1903 – imagined her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about the past. One needs patience to adjust, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I was reluctant to address the composer’s background for some time.

I deeply hoped Avril to be her father’s daughter. To some extent, that held. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be observed in several pieces, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the titles of her father’s compositions to see how he heard himself as both a standard-bearer of British Romantic style and also a advocate of the African heritage.

It was here that father and daughter began to differ.

The United States evaluated Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his heritage. At the time the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in that era, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He adapted this literary work to music and the next year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt vicarious pride as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Activism and Politics

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. At the turn of the century, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in London where he met the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, such as the oppression of the Black community there. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He sustained relationships with trailblazers for equality like the scholar and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on equality for all, and even discussed issues of racism with the American leader during an invitation to the White House in that year. Regarding his compositions, the scholar reflected, “he established his reputation so notably as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, in his thirties. But what would Samuel have thought of his offspring’s move to travel to this country in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she didn’t agree with the system “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, guided by benevolent residents of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from the US under segregation, she might have thought twice about this system. However, existence had sheltered her.

Identity and Naivety

“I possess a UK passport,” she said, “and the authorities never asked me about my race.” So, with her “fair” complexion (according to the magazine), she floated alongside white society, supported by their acclaim for her late father. She presented about her family’s work at the University of Cape Town and directed the national orchestra in that location, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” Although a skilled pianist on her own, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Rather, she always led as the maestro; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

She desired, as she stated, she “could introduce a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. When government agents discovered her Black ancestry, she had to depart the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative urged her to go or risk imprisonment. She came home, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her inexperience dawned. “The lesson was a hard one,” she stated. Adding to her embarrassment was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I sensed a known narrative. The account of being British until it’s revoked – which recalls Black soldiers who defended the UK in the global conflict and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,