🔗 Share this article

This talented musician constantly bore the burden of her father’s reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous English composers of the 1900s, Avril’s identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I sat with these legacies as I made arrangements to produce the world premiere recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. Boasting emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, her composition will offer audiences valuable perspective into how she – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her world as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

Yet about shadows. One needs patience to adapt, to see shapes as they actually appear, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to confront the composer’s background for a while.

I deeply hoped the composer to be a reflection of her father. Partially, this was true. The rustic British sounds 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 names of her family’s music to realize how he heard himself as both a champion of English Romanticism as well as a voice of the African heritage.

This was where Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

White America evaluated Samuel by the excellence of his compositions instead of the his ethnicity.

Family Background

As a student at the renowned institution, her father – the child of a African father and a British mother – turned toward his heritage. At the time the poet of color this literary figure arrived in England in that era, the young musician eagerly sought him out. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the next year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his music as opposed to the his race.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not temper his activism. During that period, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he encountered the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and saw a range of talks, including on the mistreatment of African people in South Africa. He remained an advocate to his final days. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights including the scholar and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even talked about matters of race with the US President while visiting to the US capital in that year. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in that year, aged 37. Yet how might Samuel have thought of his offspring’s move to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she did not support with the system “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, directed by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more attuned to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about this system. Yet her life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents did not inquire me about my race.” Therefore, with her “light” complexion (as Jet put it), she floated among the Europeans, lifted by their acclaim for her renowned family member. She presented about her family’s work at the educational institution and directed the broadcasting ensemble in that location, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a confident pianist personally, she avoided playing as the featured artist in her piece. Rather, she always led as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “might bring a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. Once officials learned of her African heritage, she had to depart the country. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner urged her to go or be jailed. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her inexperience dawned. “This experience was a hard one,” she lamented. Compounding her disgrace was the 1955 publication of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these memories, I perceived a familiar story. The narrative of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind troops of color who served for the English during the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,