🔗 Share this article

This talented musician always bore the burden of her parent’s heritage. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known British composers of the early 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the deep shadows of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these shadows as I prepared to record the world premiere recording of her piano concerto from 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, this piece will offer music lovers fascinating insight into how this artist – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about legacies. One needs patience to adapt, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to separate fact from distortion, and I was reluctant to confront Avril’s past for some time.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be heard in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to examine the titles of her parent’s works to see how he heard himself as not just a champion of UK romantic tradition but a voice of the African heritage.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

American society judged Samuel by the mastery of his music rather than the his racial background.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the offspring of a African father and a white English mother – began embracing his African roots. At the time the poet of color the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He adapted this literary work into music and the next year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, particularly among Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America evaluated the composer by the brilliance of his art instead of the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Fame did not reduce Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in London where he made the acquaintance of the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was an activist to his final days. He sustained relationships with trailblazers for equality such as the scholar and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even talked about issues of racism with the US President while visiting to the US capital in 1904. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so high as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in 1912, in his thirties. Yet how might her father have thought of his daughter’s decision to work in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the appropriate course”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she did not support with this policy “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, guided by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. Were the composer more in tune to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about this system. Yet her life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a UK passport,” she stated, “and the officials failed to question me about my race.” Therefore, with her “light” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved within European circles, lifted by their admiration for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, featuring the bold final section of her composition, titled: “Dedicated to my Father.” Even though a confident pianist on her own, she never played as the soloist in her piece. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “could introduce a change”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her Black ancestry, she had to depart the country. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the UK representative recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a difficult one,” she stated. Adding to her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from the country.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these shadows, I sensed a recurring theme. The story of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – that brings to mind Black soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK throughout the second world war and lived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,