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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly bore the pressure of her father’s reputation. Being the child of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the best-known British composers of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was shrouded in the deep shadows of history.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I sat with these shadows as I made arrangements to record the world premiere recording of her piano concerto from 1936. Boasting intense musical themes, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will offer new listeners deep understanding into how the composer – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – imagined her existence as a woman of colour.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. One needs patience to adapt, to perceive forms as they really are, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to address the composer’s background for a period.

I deeply hoped the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, she was. The rustic British sounds of her father’s impact can be observed in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the headings of her family’s music to realize how he identified as both a standard-bearer of UK romantic tradition as well as a representative of the African heritage.

This was where parent and child appeared to part ways.

White America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his compositions instead of the colour of his skin.

Family Background

As a student at the Royal College of Music, her father – the offspring of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. Once the poet of color the renowned Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He adapted this literary work as a composition and the following year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an worldwide sensation, notably for the Black community who felt indirect honor as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions instead of the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he attended the First Pan African Conference in London where he encountered the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the oppression of Black South Africans. He was an activist until the end. He kept connections with early civil rights leaders including the scholar and this leader, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even discussed racial problems with the American leader during an invitation to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so notably as a musician that it will long be remembered.” He succumbed in that year, in his thirties. However, how would the composer have made of his child’s choice to travel to South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the appropriate course”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with the system “as a concept” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, overseen by benevolent South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in segregated America, she might have thought twice about this system. Yet her life had protected her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents failed to question me about my background.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (according to the magazine), she traveled among the Europeans, supported by their praise for her renowned family member. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, subtitled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a confident pianist on her own, she did not perform as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “might bring a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. After authorities learned of her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the country. Her British passport offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the scale of her innocence was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she stated. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these memories, I felt a known narrative. The account of identifying as British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British in the second world war and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,