🔗 Share this article

Avril Coleridge-Taylor always felt the weight of her family reputation. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known English artists of the 1900s, Avril’s identity was shrouded in the long shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these legacies as I got ready to produce the inaugural album of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, her composition will provide music lovers deep understanding into how the composer – a wartime composer born in 1903 – imagined her world as a woman of colour.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to confront the composer’s background for a period.

I had so wanted Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be heard in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the headings of her parent’s works to understand how he viewed himself as not just a flag bearer of British Romantic style as well as a advocate of the African diaspora.

At this point parent and child began to differ.

The United States assessed the composer by the mastery of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Family Background

While he was studying at the prestigious music college, the composer – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his African roots. Once the poet of color this literary figure came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He adapted the poet’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt vicarious pride as American society evaluated the composer by the quality of his music rather than the his background.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. At the turn of the century, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in England where he met the Black American thinker this influential figure and saw a range of talks, including on the oppression of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders such as Du Bois and this leader, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even talked about matters of race with the US President during an invitation to the presidential residence in that year. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he established his reputation so prominently as a musician that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He died in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would the composer have made of his offspring’s move to travel to South Africa in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, directed by well-meaning people of every background”. Had Avril been more aligned to her father’s politics, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. However, existence had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “light” skin (as Jet put it), she traveled within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her deceased parent. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and led the broadcasting ensemble in that location, featuring the heroic third movement of her composition, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “might bring a shift”. However, by that year, things fell apart. After authorities discovered her African heritage, she could no longer stay the nation. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the UK representative advised her to leave or face arrest. She returned to England, embarrassed as the extent of her naivety was realized. “The lesson was a hard one,” she expressed. Compounding her embarrassment was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Familiar Story

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The narrative of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the UK during the second world war and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,