Out of Darkness: Why Avril Coleridge-Taylor Warrants to Be Listened To

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly experienced the burden of her parent’s legacy. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known English composers of the 1900s, her identity was shrouded in the deep shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I contemplated these memories as I made arrangements to produce the first-ever recording of Avril’s piano concerto from 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and confident beats, this piece will offer audiences valuable perspective into how she – a composer during war who entered the world in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

However about shadows. It requires time to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from distortion, and I was reluctant to confront Avril’s past for some time.

I earnestly desired Avril to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, she was. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the names of her family’s music to realize how he heard himself as not just a standard-bearer of UK romantic tradition but a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

American society assessed the composer by the excellence of his music rather than the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – turned toward his heritage. Once the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He set this literary work into music and the next year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, particularly among the Black community who felt shared pride as the majority judged Samuel by the quality of his art rather than the his race.

Principles and Actions

Recognition did not reduce his activism. During that period, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in London where he encountered the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a series of speeches, such as the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights such as the scholar and the educator Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the US President while visiting to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so prominently as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in 1912, aged 37. Yet how might the composer have made of his daughter’s decision to be in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to South African policy,” ran a headline in the Black American publication Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with apartheid “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, guided by good-intentioned residents of every background”. If Avril had been more aligned to her father’s politics, or born in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the officials did not inquire me about my race.” Therefore, with her “fair” skin (according to the magazine), she floated among the Europeans, supported by their acclaim for her late father. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and led the broadcasting ensemble in that location, featuring the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist personally, she never played as the lead performer in her piece. Instead, she always led as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

The composer aspired, in her own words, she “might bring a transformation”. However, by that year, things fell apart. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she had to depart the nation. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She came home, feeling great shame as the scale of her naivety dawned. “The lesson was a hard one,” she stated. Increasing her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I felt a recurring theme. The account of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – that brings to mind troops of color who defended the English throughout the second world war and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,