🔗 Share this article

This talented musician constantly experienced the burden of her father’s reputation. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known English composers of the early 20th century, her reputation was cloaked in the long shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I contemplated these legacies as I got ready to produce the inaugural album of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, this piece will offer music lovers fascinating insight into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – 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 actually appear, to separate fact from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to face Avril’s past for some time.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be detected in numerous compositions, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the headings of her family’s music to see how he viewed himself as not only a flag bearer of English Romanticism and also a advocate of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

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

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 white English mother – started to lean into his African roots. When the poet of color this literary figure arrived in England in that era, the young musician eagerly sought him out. He adapted this literary work into music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, notably for the Black community who felt shared pride as the majority assessed his work by the quality of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not temper his beliefs. In 1900, he participated in the pioneering African conference in the UK where he encountered the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, covering the mistreatment of the Black community there. He was a campaigner until the end. He kept connections with early civil rights leaders such as this intellectual and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even talked about racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt during an invitation to the US capital in that year. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so high as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, in his thirties. Yet how might her father have made of his daughter’s decision to work in the African nation in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to South African policy,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with apartheid “in principle” and it “could be left to resolve itself, overseen by benevolent people of every background”. Had Avril been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or born in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a UK passport,” she said, “and the authorities never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as described), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their admiration for her renowned family member. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Although a accomplished player personally, she never played as the soloist in her concerto. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

She desired, in her own words, she “might bring a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents learned of her Black ancestry, she had to depart the land. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or face arrest. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her naivety was realized. “The lesson was a hard one,” she expressed. Adding to her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I felt a familiar story. The narrative of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind Black soldiers who defended the UK throughout the global conflict and made it through but were denied their due compensation. Along with the Windrush era,