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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the weight of her family reputation. Being the child of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s name was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of the past.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these legacies as I prepared to produce the inaugural album of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, her composition will offer new listeners fascinating insight into how the composer – a composer during war who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

Yet about legacies. It can take a while to adapt, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I felt hesitant to address her history for a period.

I earnestly desired Avril to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be detected in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the headings of her family’s music to realize how he heard himself as not only a standard-bearer of English Romanticism as well as a representative of the Black diaspora.

This was where Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

White America judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the Royal College of Music, her father – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his African roots. Once the African American poet this literary figure visited the UK in that era, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the next year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, especially with African Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the quality of his art as opposed to the his background.

Activism and Politics

Fame failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. At the turn of the century, he attended the pioneering African conference in the UK where he met the Black American thinker this influential figure and saw a range of talks, covering the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders including the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even talked about issues of racism with the US President on a trip to the US capital in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so prominently as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. But what would the composer have made of his offspring’s move to travel to the African nation in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she did not support with this policy “fundamentally” and it “could be left to resolve itself, directed by good-intentioned residents of all races”. Had Avril been more attuned to her parent’s beliefs, or raised in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. Yet her life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a British passport,” she stated, “and the officials failed to question me about my race.” Thus, with her “fair” skin (according to the magazine), she moved within European circles, supported by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the educational institution and led the national orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” While a confident pianist on her own, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. On the contrary, she always led as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “may foster a change”. But by 1954, things fell apart. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she was forced to leave the country. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner urged her to go or face arrest. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her innocence was realized. “This experience was a difficult one,” she expressed. Increasing her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a recurring theme. The account of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the English in the second world war and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,