The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly experienced the weight of her family legacy. Being the child of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the most famous English artists of the early 20th century, the composer’s reputation was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.
In recent months, I reflected on these legacies as I got ready to make the first-ever recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. Featuring impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and confident beats, this piece will provide music lovers valuable perspective into how this artist – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a artist with mixed heritage.
Yet about shadows. One needs patience to adjust, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to face her history for a period.
I earnestly desired Avril to be her father’s daughter. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be observed in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the headings of her family’s music to realize how he identified as not just a standard-bearer of British Romantic style and also a advocate of the African heritage.
It was here that father and daughter appeared to part ways.
The United States judged Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his ethnicity.
While he was studying at the prestigious music college, Samuel – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his African roots. Once the poet of color the renowned Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He set Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the next year adapted his verses for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.
Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his music instead of the his background.
Recognition failed to diminish his beliefs. In 1900, he was present at the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he encountered the prominent scholar this influential figure and observed a series of speeches, including on the oppression of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like Du Bois and this leader, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even discussed matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the White House in that year. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so notably as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He passed away in that year, at 37 years old. Yet how might the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to be in this country in the 1950s?
“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the right policy”, she informed Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with apartheid “in principle” and it “could be left to resolve itself, guided by benevolent people of every background”. Had Avril been more in tune to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she might have thought twice about this system. However, existence had protected her.
“I possess a British passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my background.” Thus, with her “fair” skin (as Jet put it), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their acclaim for her late father. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and directed the national orchestra in that location, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a confident pianist on her own, she never played as the featured artist in her work. Instead, she always led as the conductor; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.
She desired, according to her, she “could introduce a shift”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. Once officials learned of her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the nation. Her UK document didn’t protect her, the diplomatic official advised her to leave or face arrest. She came home, deeply ashamed as the scale of her innocence was realized. “This experience was a difficult one,” she stated. Compounding her embarrassment was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.
Upon contemplating with these legacies, I perceived a familiar story. The account of being British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the British throughout the global conflict and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,
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