🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually felt the weight of her parent’s heritage. As the daughter of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent British musicians of the early 20th century, her reputation was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these shadows as I prepared to produce the first-ever recording of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. With its emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, her composition will provide new listeners fascinating insight into how the composer – a composer during war who entered the world in 1903 – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about shadows. One needs patience to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to separate fact from distortion, and I was reluctant to address her history for some time.

I deeply hoped her to be her father’s daughter. Partially, that held. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be detected in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to review the names of her family’s music to see how he heard himself as not only a flag bearer of UK romantic tradition and also a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

White America assessed the composer by the excellence of his music instead of the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the Royal College of Music, her father – the offspring of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. At the time the African American poet this literary figure came to London in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He adapted this literary work into music and the following year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as American society evaluated the composer by the quality of his compositions as opposed to the his background.

Principles and Actions

Success did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he met the African American intellectual this influential figure and saw a variety of discussions, including on the subjugation of the Black community there. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as Du Bois and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with the US President on a trip to the US capital in that year. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so high as a musician that it will endure.” He passed away in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would her father have made of his child’s choice to travel to the African nation in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with this policy “in principle” and it “should be allowed to resolve itself, directed by benevolent South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more in tune to her family’s principles, or raised in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about apartheid. However, existence had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a English document,” she remarked, “and the authorities failed to question me about my race.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as described), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and led the national orchestra in that location, including the inspiring part of her composition, subtitled: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a skilled pianist personally, she did not perform as the featured artist in her work. Rather, she always led as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the scale of her innocence dawned. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Compounding her disgrace was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I sensed a familiar story. The narrative of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the UK throughout the World War II and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,