🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually experienced the pressure of her family legacy. Being the child of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous English artists of the early 20th century, her reputation was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I reflected on these memories as I prepared to make the first-ever recording of her piano concerto from 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will provide audiences fascinating insight into how the composer – an artist in conflict who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her existence as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about legacies. It requires time to adjust, to perceive forms as they really are, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I had been afraid to address Avril’s past for a period.

I earnestly desired her to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, she was. The idyllic English tones of parental inspiration can be heard in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the names of her family’s music to understand how he heard himself as not just a flag bearer of UK romantic tradition as well as a voice of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

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

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the renowned institution, the composer – the offspring of a African father and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his background. Once the poet of color this literary figure arrived in England in 1897, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the following year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the quality of his compositions instead of the his background.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not reduce Samuel’s politics. During that period, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and saw a range of talks, such as the oppression of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate until the end. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders such as Du Bois and the educator Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even discussed matters of race with the US President while visiting to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he established his reputation so notably as a musician that it will endure.” He died in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would her father have thought of his child’s choice to work in this country in the that decade?

Issues and Stance

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “struck me as the appropriate course”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with this policy “as a concept” and it “could be left to run its course, overseen by good-intentioned people of all races”. If Avril had been more attuned to her father’s politics, or born in segregated America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. Yet her life had shielded her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a English document,” she stated, “and the officials did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she traveled among the Europeans, supported by their praise for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the educational institution and directed the national orchestra in Johannesburg, including the inspiring part of her composition, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a confident pianist herself, she avoided playing as the lead performer in her concerto. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. When government agents discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the nation. Her UK document offered no defense, the diplomatic official recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She came home, feeling great shame as the scale of her inexperience dawned. “The realization was a painful one,” she lamented. Compounding her embarrassment was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Familiar Story

As I sat with these memories, I felt a known narrative. The narrative of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – which recalls African-descended soldiers who served for the British throughout the World War II and made it through but were denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,