🔗 Share this article

This talented musician always bore the burden of her family heritage. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the most famous British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s identity was enveloped in the long shadows of bygone eras.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these shadows as I prepared to make the inaugural album of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, this piece will grant music lovers deep understanding into how this artist – a composer during war who entered the world in 1903 – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about legacies. One needs patience to adapt, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I was reluctant to confront her history for a period.

I had so wanted the composer to be her father’s daughter. Partially, that held. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to review the headings of her father’s compositions to realize how he viewed himself as both a standard-bearer of English Romanticism as well as a advocate of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril began to differ.

White America evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his compositions rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his heritage. At the time the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in that era, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, particularly among the Black community who felt vicarious pride as the majority judged Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition failed to diminish his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he attended the pioneering African conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and saw a variety of discussions, covering the oppression of Black South Africans. He was an activist to his final days. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and this leader, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt during an invitation to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. However, how would the composer have thought of his child’s choice to work in the African nation in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the right policy”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with this policy “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, directed by good-intentioned people of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more attuned to her father’s politics, or born in segregated America, she could have hesitated about this system. However, existence had sheltered her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a British passport,” she said, “and the government agents never asked me about my race.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she moved among the Europeans, lifted by their praise for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and led the national orchestra in Johannesburg, featuring the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the soloist in her concerto. Rather, she consistently conducted as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “could introduce a transformation”. But by 1954, things fell apart. When government agents became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the UK representative recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the scale of her innocence became clear. “The realization was a painful one,” she expressed. Compounding her embarrassment was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these shadows, I perceived a familiar story. The story of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who served for the English during the World War II and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,