🔗 Share this article

Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly experienced the burden of her father’s heritage. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was shrouded in the long shadows of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I contemplated these shadows as I made arrangements to make the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, her composition will provide audiences fascinating insight into how she – a composer during war born in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

However about shadows. One needs patience to acclimate, to see shapes as they actually appear, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to face her history for a while.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, she was. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be heard in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the headings of her family’s music to understand how he identified as both a standard-bearer of British Romantic style but a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that parent and child seemed to diverge.

The United States assessed the composer by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the renowned institution, the composer – the son of a African father and a white English mother – turned toward his heritage. Once the poet of color this literary figure arrived in England in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with the Black community who felt vicarious pride as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition did not reduce his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in London where he met the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, covering the subjugation of the Black community there. He was a campaigner until the end. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as the scholar and this leader, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the US President during an invitation to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so prominently as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He died in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. But what would her father have thought of his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to South African policy,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the right policy”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with this policy “as a concept” and it “could be left to resolve itself, overseen by well-meaning residents of all races”. Were the composer more aligned to her father’s politics, or born in segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she stated, “and the government agents failed to question me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “light” skin (as described), she floated within European circles, buoyed up by their admiration for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the educational institution and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a skilled pianist personally, she never played as the soloist in her piece. Instead, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “might bring a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her mixed background, she was forced to leave the nation. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the UK representative recommended her departure or face arrest. She went back to the UK, embarrassed as the extent of her naivety became clear. “The realization was a hard one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her controversial discussion, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I sensed a recurring theme. The account of identifying as British until it’s revoked – that brings to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the English in the World War II and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,