🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the pressure of her parent’s heritage. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the long shadows of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these legacies as I made arrangements to produce the first-ever recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting intense musical themes, soulful lyricism, and confident beats, her composition will offer new listeners fascinating insight into how she – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

Yet about legacies. It requires time to adapt, to see shapes as they actually appear, to tell reality from distortion, and I felt hesitant to confront the composer’s background for a while.

I had so wanted the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, that held. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be detected in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the headings of her parent’s works to understand how he identified as not only a standard-bearer of British Romantic style but a advocate of the Black diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

White America assessed the composer by the mastery of his compositions rather than the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a British mother – turned toward his background. At the time the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He set Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, particularly among African Americans who felt indirect honor as American society judged Samuel by the brilliance of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Fame failed to diminish his activism. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in the UK where he met the prominent scholar this influential figure and saw a range of talks, including on the mistreatment of the Black community there. He was an activist until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights like Du Bois and this leader, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the US President on a trip to the US capital in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so prominently as a composer that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in that year, in his thirties. However, how would her father have reacted to his offspring’s move to be in South Africa in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist gives OK to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, overseen by benevolent people of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more aligned to her family’s principles, or raised in Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about the policy. But life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a English document,” she said, “and the officials never asked me about my background.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, supported by their praise for her late father. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the national orchestra in the city, including the heroic third movement of her composition, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a confident pianist on her own, she never played as the lead performer in her work. Instead, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “might bring a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the country. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the UK representative recommended her departure or face arrest. She went back to the UK, embarrassed as the magnitude of her naivety dawned. “This experience was a difficult one,” she stated. Compounding her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a known narrative. The story of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British during the second world war and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,