Emerging from Darkness: Why Avril Coleridge-Taylor Merits to Be Heard

Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly bore the burden of her father’s reputation. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, her identity was cloaked in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

The First Recording

Not long ago, I reflected on these memories as I made arrangements to produce the first-ever recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will provide audiences valuable perspective into how she – a composer during war born in 1903 – imagined her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about legacies. It requires time to adjust, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from distortion, and I had been afraid to address her history for a period.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, she was. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be heard in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to review the titles of her family’s music to see how he viewed himself as both a standard-bearer of English Romanticism and also a representative of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

White America assessed the composer by the excellence of his music as opposed to the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, the composer – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a British mother – started to lean into his heritage. At the time the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He set the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the following year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an worldwide sensation, notably for Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America evaluated the composer by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Fame failed to diminish his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in London where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and observed a range of talks, including on the oppression of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner to his final days. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as this intellectual and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even discussed issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt on a trip to the presidential residence in 1904. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, aged 37. But what would Samuel have reacted to his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist shows support to South African policy,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with this policy “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, directed by well-meaning South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about the policy. Yet her life had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities failed to question me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “light” appearance (as Jet put it), she traveled alongside white society, supported by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She presented about her family’s work at the educational institution and conducted the national orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the inspiring part of her concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” While a skilled pianist personally, she avoided playing as the featured artist in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. After authorities became aware of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the land. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, embarrassed as the magnitude of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a painful one,” she stated. Compounding her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from the country.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these shadows, I sensed a recurring theme. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who served for the UK during the second world war and lived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,