🔗 Share this article

This talented musician continually experienced the weight of her father’s reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the best-known British musicians of the early 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the long shadows of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these shadows as I got ready to make the world premiere recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will provide audiences fascinating insight into how the composer – a composer during war born in 1903 – envisioned her world as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about legacies. One needs patience to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to confront her history for a period.

I had so wanted the composer to be her father’s daughter. Partially, that held. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be heard in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the names of her father’s compositions to understand how he viewed himself as both a flag bearer of UK romantic tradition and also a voice of the African heritage.

This was where parent and child appeared to part ways.

White America judged Samuel by the mastery of his music instead of the his racial background.

Family Background

While he was studying at the renowned institution, the composer – the son of a African father and a British mother – began embracing his background. When the poet of color the renowned Dunbar 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 subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, particularly among African Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his art instead of the his background.

Activism and Politics

Fame did not reduce his beliefs. During that period, he was present at the pioneering African conference in London where he met the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and saw a variety of discussions, such as the oppression of Black South Africans. He was an activist throughout his life. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like the scholar and the educator Washington, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even talked about racial problems with the American leader while visiting to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so high as a composer that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He died in the early 20th century, aged 37. Yet how might Samuel have thought of his child’s choice to work in this country in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she did not support with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “could be left to run its course, overseen by benevolent South Africans of all races”. Were the composer more attuned to her parent’s beliefs, or raised in Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. Yet her life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she stated, “and the officials never asked me about my race.” So, with her “fair” appearance (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, supported by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and directed the national orchestra in that location, programming the inspiring part of her composition, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a accomplished player on her own, she never played as the soloist in her work. Rather, she always led as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “may foster a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. When government agents learned of her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the land. Her UK document offered no defense, the British high commissioner urged her to go or risk imprisonment. She came home, deeply ashamed as the extent of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a painful one,” she lamented. Compounding her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these memories, I felt a recurring theme. The narrative of being British until it’s challenged – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the English throughout the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,