🔗 Share this article

This talented musician always felt the weight of her family heritage. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK musicians of the 1900s, her reputation was enveloped in the long shadows of history.

A World Premiere

Not long ago, I reflected on these shadows as I prepared to record the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, her composition will offer new listeners valuable perspective into how this artist – an artist in conflict originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her existence as a artist with mixed heritage.

Legacy and Reality

However about shadows. It can take a while to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from distortion, and I felt hesitant to confront her history for some time.

I had so wanted Avril to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, she was. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be observed in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the titles of her parent’s works to see how he identified as not only a champion of UK romantic tradition but a representative of the Black diaspora.

This was where parent and child began to differ.

The United States judged Samuel by the brilliance of his art instead of the his racial background.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the prestigious music college, the composer – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – began embracing his background. When the Black American writer this literary figure visited the UK in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He set the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an global success, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as white America assessed his work by the quality of his compositions rather than the his race.

Principles and Actions

Success did not reduce his beliefs. In 1900, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in England where he encountered the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, including on the subjugation of the Black community there. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders including this intellectual and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on racial equality, and even talked about matters of race with the US President while visiting to the White House in the early 1900s. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so high as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, in his thirties. But what would Samuel have reacted to his daughter’s decision to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to S African Bias,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “seems to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, guided by good-intentioned people of every background”. Were the composer more attuned to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. But life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my race.” Thus, with her “fair” appearance (as described), she moved alongside white society, buoyed up by their praise for her deceased parent. She presented about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and led the national orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the bold final section of her concerto, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a accomplished player personally, she did not perform as the soloist in her piece. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “may foster a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. When government agents discovered her mixed background, she was forced to leave the country. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the UK representative advised her to leave or be jailed. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the scale of her innocence became clear. “This experience was a hard one,” she stated. Adding to her disgrace was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these memories, I perceived a familiar story. The account of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the UK during the second world war and survived only to be refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,