🔗 Share this article

Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly experienced the weight of her parent’s reputation. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent British composers of the 1900s, Avril’s identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of the past.

The First Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these memories as I made arrangements to record the world premiere recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and confident beats, Avril’s work will provide new listeners deep understanding into how she – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – conceived of her world as a woman of colour.

Shadows and Truth

Yet about shadows. It can take a while to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to face her history for a period.

I had so wanted the composer to be a reflection of her father. To some extent, this was true. The idyllic English tones of her father’s impact can be detected in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the titles of her family’s music to realize how he identified as both a champion of UK romantic tradition as well as a representative of the African heritage.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

The United States assessed the composer by the mastery of his music as opposed to the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – turned toward his African roots. When the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He set this literary work to music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his music instead of the his background.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success failed to diminish his activism. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in England where he encountered the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, including on the oppression of the Black community there. He was an activist to his final days. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders like the scholar and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on racial equality, and even discussed matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the presidential residence in that year. In terms of his art, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will endure.” He succumbed in that year, in his thirties. Yet how might Samuel have thought of his daughter’s decision to work in the African nation in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the right policy”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she did not support with the system “as a concept” and it “could be left to resolve itself, directed by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about apartheid. However, existence had protected her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a UK passport,” she stated, “and the officials never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” skin (according to the magazine), she traveled among the Europeans, buoyed up by their praise for her renowned family member. She presented about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and led the national orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her composition, titled: “Dedicated to my Father.” Even though a confident pianist on her own, she did not perform as the lead performer in her concerto. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “could introduce a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. After authorities became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the nation. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the UK representative advised her to leave or face arrest. She came home, feeling great shame as the scale of her innocence was realized. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Increasing her disgrace was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these shadows, I felt a familiar story. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind Black soldiers who defended the UK throughout the World War II and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,