🔗 Share this article

This talented musician continually experienced the burden of her father’s heritage. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous English composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s name was cloaked in the long shadows of history.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I prepared to produce the world premiere recording of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will offer audiences fascinating insight into how the composer – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

Yet about the past. It can take a while to acclimate, to see shapes as they really are, to separate fact from distortion, and I felt hesitant to face her history for a period.

I deeply hoped her to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The idyllic English tones of parental inspiration can be heard in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the names of her father’s compositions to realize how he identified as not only a flag bearer of British Romantic style and also a representative of the African heritage.

At this point parent and child appeared to part ways.

American society assessed the composer by the excellence of his music instead of the his racial background.

Family Background

As a student at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a African father and a British mother – began embracing his background. When the African American poet the renowned Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the next year used the poet’s words for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, notably for Black Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority assessed his work by the brilliance of his music instead of the his background.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not reduce Samuel’s politics. During that period, he attended the pioneering African conference in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and saw a range of talks, covering the oppression of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and this leader, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with the American leader during an invitation to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so prominently as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He died in that year, at 37 years old. But what would the composer have reacted to his offspring’s move to work in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Issues and Stance

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to apartheid system,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the right policy”, she informed Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with this policy “in principle” and it “could be left to work itself out, overseen by good-intentioned people of all races”. Were the composer more attuned to her father’s politics, or from segregated America, she could have hesitated about this system. However, existence had shielded her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a English document,” she remarked, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “fair” skin (as described), she floated within European circles, lifted by their praise for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the educational institution and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, featuring the bold final section of her composition, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a accomplished player on her own, she did not perform as the lead performer in her concerto. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

She desired, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her African heritage, she was forced to leave the nation. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She came home, deeply ashamed as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a difficult one,” she lamented. Compounding her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I perceived a known narrative. The account of being British until it’s challenged – one that calls to mind troops of color who served for the English throughout the second world war and survived only to be denied their due compensation. Along with the Windrush era,