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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the weight of her parent’s reputation. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous British composers of the early 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the deep shadows of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

Not long ago, I sat with these memories as I got ready to make the first-ever recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring intense musical themes, expressive melodies, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will offer audiences valuable perspective into how this artist – a composer during war born in 1903 – envisioned her world as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about the past. It requires time to acclimate, to perceive forms as they really are, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to address Avril’s past for a while.

I earnestly desired the composer to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be heard in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the names of her father’s compositions to realize how he identified as not just a standard-bearer of English Romanticism but a advocate of the Black diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril began to differ.

White America assessed the composer by the mastery of his music rather than the his racial background.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, her father – the offspring of a African father and a white English mother – turned toward his background. When the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He set this literary work as a composition and the next year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an global success, particularly among Black Americans who felt indirect honor as white America assessed his work by the quality of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success did not reduce Samuel’s politics. During that period, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he encountered the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the oppression of the Black community there. He was a campaigner to his final days. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality such as Du Bois and this leader, gave addresses on ending discrimination, and even talked about matters of race with the US President during an invitation to the US capital in that year. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so notably as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would the composer have made of his daughter’s decision to work in the African nation in the 1950s?

Issues and Stance

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “seems to me the appropriate course”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with the system “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, guided by benevolent South Africans of all races”. If Avril had been more aligned to her family’s principles, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about this system. However, existence had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the officials failed to question me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and led the broadcasting ensemble in the city, featuring the inspiring part of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist personally, she never played as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “may foster a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her mixed background, she could no longer stay the nation. Her UK document offered no defense, the UK representative urged her to go or face arrest. She returned to England, embarrassed as the magnitude of her inexperience dawned. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Compounding her embarrassment was the 1955 publication of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these shadows, I sensed a known narrative. The story of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind Black soldiers who served for the British during the World War II and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,