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Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly felt the burden of her father’s reputation. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known English musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s reputation was enveloped in the lingering obscurity of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these legacies as I prepared to make the first-ever recording of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. With its emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, Avril’s work will grant music lovers valuable perspective into how this artist – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – imagined her reality as a artist with mixed heritage.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about legacies. It requires time to adapt, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to address 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 detected in several pieces, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the headings of her parent’s works to realize how he viewed himself as not just a flag bearer of British Romantic style as well as a representative of the African diaspora.

At this point Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

American society evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his art as opposed to the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – turned toward his background. Once the Black American writer the renowned Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He set Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the following year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, notably for the Black community who felt vicarious pride as white America judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions instead of the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not reduce his activism. At the turn of the century, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he encountered the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and saw a series of speeches, covering the oppression of Black South Africans. He was an activist to his final days. He maintained ties with trailblazers for equality including the scholar and the educator Washington, gave addresses on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the American leader on a trip to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a musician that it will long be remembered.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would Samuel have thought of his child’s choice to work in this country in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she was not in favor with this policy “fundamentally” and it “could be left to work itself out, overseen by well-meaning people of every background”. Were the composer more in tune to her father’s politics, or raised in segregated America, she might have thought twice about apartheid. But life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I possess a British passport,” she said, “and the government agents did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (according to the magazine), she moved among the Europeans, supported by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the educational institution and led the national orchestra in that location, including the bold final section of her composition, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player herself, she never played as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “could introduce a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she could no longer stay the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the diplomatic official urged her to go or face arrest. She came home, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her naivety became clear. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Adding to her embarrassment was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these shadows, I felt a known narrative. The story of being British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind Black soldiers who defended the UK throughout the second world war and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. Including those from Windrush,