🔗 Share this article

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the burden of her father’s heritage. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous British artists of the 1900s, the composer’s reputation was shrouded in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I reflected on these memories as I got ready to make the world premiere recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant music lovers valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – imagined her existence as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

But here’s the thing about legacies. It can take a while to adjust, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I had been afraid to face her history for a while.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, that held. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be heard in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the headings of her father’s compositions to understand how he heard himself as not only a standard-bearer of British Romantic style but a voice of the African heritage.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

American society assessed the composer by the brilliance of his compositions rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

As a student at the Royal College of Music, her father – the child of a African father and a white English mother – began embracing his background. At the time the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success did not temper his beliefs. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in the UK where he met the prominent scholar this influential figure and observed a range of talks, such as the mistreatment of the Black community there. He was an activist until the end. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights including this intellectual and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even talked about racial problems with the US President on a trip to the presidential residence in 1904. Regarding his compositions, reminisced Du Bois, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He died in that year, aged 37. However, how would the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to work in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she didn’t agree with the system “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, overseen by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more in tune to her father’s politics, or from Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a UK passport,” she stated, “and the government agents never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “light” complexion (as Jet put it), she floated alongside white society, buoyed up by their acclaim for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the educational institution and led the national orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her concerto, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist on her own, she never played as the lead performer in her concerto. On the contrary, she always led as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble performed under her direction.

She desired, in her own words, she “may foster a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents learned of her mixed background, she was forced to leave the country. Her UK document didn’t protect her, the British high commissioner advised her to leave or face arrest. She returned to England, feeling great shame as the extent of her innocence became clear. “The lesson was a hard one,” she stated. Compounding her disgrace was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The story of identifying as British until you’re not – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the English in the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,