🔗 Share this article

This talented musician always felt the burden of her parent’s legacy. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s reputation was shrouded in the long shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I got ready to produce the world premiere recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, this piece will offer audiences deep understanding into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – imagined her reality as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to face her history for some time.

I earnestly desired the composer to be her father’s daughter. Partially, that held. The idyllic English tones of parental inspiration can be observed in several pieces, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the names of her parent’s works to realize how he identified as not only a champion of English Romanticism and also a advocate of the Black diaspora.

This was where parent and child seemed to diverge.

White America evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Family Background

During his studies at the prestigious music college, her father – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – started to lean into his heritage. When the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the young musician actively pursued him. He set Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, notably for African Americans who felt vicarious pride as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success did not temper his activism. During that period, he was present at the pioneering African conference in London where he met the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the subjugation of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate to his final days. He kept connections with early civil rights leaders such as this intellectual and this leader, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the White House in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in that year, in his thirties. However, how would the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to travel to this country in the 1950s?

Issues and Stance

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she was not in favor with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “could be left to work itself out, directed by benevolent South Africans of all races”. If Avril had been more attuned to her parent’s beliefs, or from the US under segregation, she might have thought twice about apartheid. But life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents never asked me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “light” appearance (according to the magazine), she traveled within European circles, supported by their admiration for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in that location, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player personally, she did not perform as the featured artist in her piece. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “may foster a transformation”. However, by that year, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she was forced to leave the country. Her British passport didn’t protect her, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She came home, feeling great shame as the scale of her innocence dawned. “The realization was a painful one,” she expressed. Adding to her disgrace was the 1955 publication of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Familiar Story

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The story of holding UK citizenship until it’s challenged – which recalls African-descended soldiers who defended the UK in the second world war and survived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,