This talented musician constantly experienced the pressure of her family legacy. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the best-known English composers of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s reputation was enveloped in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.
Not long ago, I sat with these legacies as I got ready to record the first-ever recording of Avril’s piano concerto from 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will grant audiences valuable perspective into how she – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.
But here’s the thing about the past. One needs patience to adjust, to recognize outlines as they really are, to distinguish truth from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to face Avril’s past for some time.
I deeply hoped Avril to be her father’s daughter. 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). But you only have to look at the names of her family’s music to realize how he viewed himself as not just a flag bearer of English Romanticism but a advocate of the African heritage.
At this point parent and child seemed to diverge.
White America judged Samuel by the mastery of his music rather than the colour of his skin.
While he was studying at the renowned institution, the composer – the son of a African father and a white English mother – began embracing his African roots. At the time the Black American writer the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He set Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.
Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, especially with Black Americans who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his music rather than the his background.
Fame did not reduce his activism. In 1900, he was present at the initial Pan African gathering in England where he encountered the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and witnessed a series of speeches, including on the oppression of the Black community there. He was an activist to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like this intellectual and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even engaged in dialogue on issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt on a trip to the US capital in that year. Regarding his compositions, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. Yet how might the composer have thought of his offspring’s move to work in the African nation in the 1950s?
“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the appropriate course”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with the system “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, overseen by benevolent South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more attuned to her father’s politics, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about the policy. Yet her life had protected her.
“I have a British passport,” she stated, “and the government agents failed to question me about my background.” Thus, with her “fair” complexion (according to the magazine), she moved within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her late father. She presented about her family’s work at the University of Cape Town and conducted the national orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her composition, named: “In memory of my Father.” Although a skilled pianist on her own, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. On the contrary, she always led as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.
The composer aspired, as she stated, she “might bring a change”. However, by that year, circumstances deteriorated. After authorities learned of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the nation. Her British passport didn’t protect her, the UK representative advised her to leave or face arrest. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the scale of her inexperience dawned. “The realization was a hard one,” she stated. Compounding her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.
As I sat with these memories, I felt a recurring theme. The narrative of identifying as British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind Black soldiers who defended the English in the global conflict and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,
Elara is a seasoned gaming journalist with a passion for slot mechanics and player strategies.
