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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly bore the pressure of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known UK artists of the early 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I contemplated these shadows as I prepared to make the inaugural album of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, her composition will offer audiences deep understanding into how the composer – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – conceived of her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

Yet about the past. One needs patience to adjust, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to face the composer’s background for a period.

I earnestly desired the composer to be a reflection of her father. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be detected in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the names of her parent’s works to understand how he heard himself as not just a champion of British Romantic style as well as a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

American society evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his compositions instead of the colour of his skin.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, Samuel – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – turned toward his background. When the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He composed this literary work into music and the next year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, particularly among Black Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his music as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in the UK where he encountered the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and saw a series of speeches, including on the mistreatment of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality like the scholar and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the American leader while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, in his thirties. Yet how might Samuel have thought of his daughter’s decision to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Issues and Stance

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with this policy “as a concept” and it “could be left to run its course, directed by benevolent people of all races”. If Avril had been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from segregated America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I possess a English document,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my background.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she traveled among the Europeans, supported by their praise for her renowned family member. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the national orchestra in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” While a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the lead performer in her work. Instead, she always led as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era played under her baton.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “might bring a shift”. However, by that year, things fell apart. When government agents became aware of her mixed background, she had to depart the nation. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a difficult one,” she lamented. Compounding her humiliation was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I perceived a familiar story. The story of holding UK citizenship until it’s challenged – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the English in the global conflict and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,