🔗 Share this article

Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the burden of her father’s heritage. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known British musicians of the early 20th century, the composer’s reputation was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of the past.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I made arrangements to make the first-ever recording of her piano concerto from 1936. Boasting intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will offer audiences valuable perspective into how she – an artist in conflict originating from the early 1900s – imagined her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

However about shadows. It requires time to adapt, to perceive forms as they really are, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to face the composer’s background for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, she was. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to review the titles of her father’s compositions to see how he identified as both a flag bearer of UK romantic tradition as well as a representative of the African diaspora.

At this point father and daughter seemed to diverge.

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

Parental Heritage

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the offspring of a African father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his background. Once the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He adapted this literary work to music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt vicarious pride as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his background.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not temper his beliefs. During that period, he was present at the pioneering African conference in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, such as the oppression of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner to his final days. He sustained relationships with trailblazers for equality such as this intellectual and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even talked about racial problems with the US President while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, in his thirties. Yet how might her father have reacted to his child’s choice to work in this country in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she did not support with the system “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, overseen by benevolent South Africans of all races”. Were the composer more aligned to her family’s principles, or from segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. But life had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents did not inquire me about my race.” Thus, with her “light” appearance (according to the magazine), she moved within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her deceased parent. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and led the broadcasting ensemble in Johannesburg, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a accomplished player personally, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Rather, she always led as the conductor; and so the orchestra of the era played under her baton.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “could introduce a transformation”. But by 1954, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials learned of her mixed background, she had to depart the nation. Her citizenship offered no defense, the British high commissioner advised her to leave or be jailed. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her naivety became clear. “The realization was a difficult one,” she lamented. Increasing her disgrace was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I perceived a known narrative. The story of being British until it’s challenged – which recalls African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the British in the global conflict and made it through but were denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,