🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually experienced the weight of her family heritage. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the deep shadows of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these shadows as I prepared to record the world premiere recording of her piano concerto from 1936. Featuring intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, Avril’s work will offer new listeners valuable perspective into how this artist – an artist in conflict who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to address Avril’s past for a while.

I had so wanted the composer to be a reflection of her father. Partially, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be detected in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the titles of her family’s music to see how he heard himself as not just a standard-bearer of English Romanticism as well as a representative of the African heritage.

At this point Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

The United States assessed the composer by the mastery of his art as opposed to the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the child of a African father and a white English mother – started to lean into his heritage. When the Black American writer the renowned Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He set this literary work to music and the next year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, notably for Black Americans who felt shared pride as American society judged Samuel by the quality of his compositions instead of the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition did not reduce Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in London where he met the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the mistreatment of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with trailblazers for equality such as Du Bois and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt on a trip to the White House in that year. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so high as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, in his thirties. Yet how might the composer have reacted to his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with apartheid “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, directed by well-meaning residents of all races”. Were the composer more in tune to her family’s principles, or raised in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about this system. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she stated, “and the authorities never asked me about my background.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she traveled within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her family’s work at the educational institution and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, including the heroic third movement of her composition, subtitled: “Dedicated to my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist on her own, she avoided playing as the featured artist in her concerto. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “may foster a change”. However, by that year, things fell apart. Once officials became aware of her mixed background, she could no longer stay the land. Her UK document didn’t protect her, the UK representative urged her to go or be jailed. She returned to England, embarrassed as the scale of her inexperience became clear. “This experience was a painful one,” she stated. Compounding her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these memories, I sensed a known narrative. The narrative of being British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind troops of color who served for the UK in the World War II and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. Including those from Windrush,