Out of Darkness: Why Avril Coleridge-Taylor Deserves to Be Listened To

The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the burden of her parent’s legacy. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous British musicians of the 1900s, the composer’s name was shrouded in the long shadows of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I made arrangements to record the first-ever recording of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and confident beats, her composition will provide audiences deep understanding into how she – a composer during war who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her existence as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

However about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to recognize outlines as they really are, to separate fact from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to face the composer’s background for a while.

I had so wanted her to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, that held. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be observed in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the headings of her father’s compositions to see how he identified as not only a champion of English Romanticism and also a representative of the African heritage.

It was here that father and daughter appeared to part ways.

American society judged Samuel by the brilliance of his art rather than the his racial background.

Family Background

During his studies at the renowned institution, the composer – the child of a African father and a white English mother – started to lean into his heritage. At the time the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in that era, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the next year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt vicarious pride as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his art as opposed to the his race.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in London where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and saw a series of speeches, including on the oppression of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate to his final days. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights like Du Bois and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even discussed racial problems with the US President on a trip to the White House in that year. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, in his thirties. But what would her father have thought of his offspring’s move to travel to this country in the that decade?

Issues and Stance

“Child of Celebrated Artist gives OK to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she did not support with apartheid “as a concept” and it “could be left to resolve itself, overseen by benevolent South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or born in Jim Crow America, she might have thought twice about the policy. However, existence had shielded her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a UK passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “fair” appearance (as described), she floated alongside white society, supported by their admiration for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and directed the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” While a accomplished player on her own, she never played as the soloist in her piece. On the contrary, she always led as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

The composer aspired, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the diplomatic official advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, embarrassed as the magnitude of her naivety was realized. “The realization was a hard one,” she expressed. Compounding her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these shadows, I felt a recurring theme. The story of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who served for the UK in the World War II and lived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,