🔗 Share this article

Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually experienced the pressure of her father’s heritage. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the best-known UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, her reputation was cloaked in the long shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

Not long ago, I reflected on these memories as I got ready to record the first-ever recording of Avril’s piano concerto from 1936. With its emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, her composition will provide music lovers valuable perspective into how the composer – a composer during war born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about the past. One needs patience to adjust, to see shapes as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I had been afraid to face her history for some time.

I earnestly desired Avril to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, that held. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be observed in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the titles of her parent’s works to understand how he identified as not just a standard-bearer of British Romantic style and also a voice of the African heritage.

At this point father and daughter began to differ.

White America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his art instead of the colour of his skin.

Family Background

As a student at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the offspring of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his African roots. At the time the African American poet this literary figure visited the UK in 1897, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the next year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success did not temper his activism. During that period, he was present at the initial Pan African gathering in London where he met the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, covering the subjugation of the Black community there. He remained an advocate until the end. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality like this intellectual and this leader, gave addresses on ending discrimination, and even discussed issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so high as a creative artist that it will endure.” He passed away in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. However, how would the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to work in South Africa in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to S African Bias,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the appropriate course”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she did not support with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, guided by well-meaning people of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more attuned to her parent’s beliefs, or born in segregated America, she could have hesitated about this system. However, existence had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “fair” skin (as described), she floated among the Europeans, supported by their acclaim for her late father. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in that location, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” While a confident pianist herself, she did not perform as the lead performer in her concerto. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “might bring a shift”. But by 1954, circumstances deteriorated. After authorities learned of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the country. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official advised her to leave or face arrest. She returned to England, embarrassed as the extent of her inexperience became clear. “The realization was a hard one,” she lamented. Compounding her disgrace was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I perceived a known narrative. The narrative of identifying as British until you’re not – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British in the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,