🔗 Share this article

This talented musician always experienced the weight of her parent’s legacy. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent UK composers of the 1900s, her reputation was enveloped in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

Not long ago, I contemplated these memories as I prepared to record the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will grant audiences deep understanding into how this artist – a composer during war originating from the early 1900s – conceived of her reality as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

However about shadows. It can take a while to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to distinguish truth from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to face Avril’s past for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, that held. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be observed in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to examine the titles of her family’s music to realize how he viewed himself as not just a champion of UK romantic tradition but a advocate of the African diaspora.

This was where Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

The United States judged Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

As a student at the prestigious music college, Samuel – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a British mother – started to lean into his background. When the Black American writer this literary figure came to London in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances to music and the following year adapted his verses for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, notably for the Black community who felt vicarious pride as the majority judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions rather than the his background.

Activism and Politics

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. During that period, he was present at the pioneering African conference in England where he met the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, covering the subjugation of the Black community there. He remained an advocate until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including the scholar and this leader, gave addresses on racial equality, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the US President on a trip to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so notably as a musician that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in that year, at 37 years old. However, how would Samuel have reacted to his child’s choice to travel to this country in the mid-20th century?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with this policy “fundamentally” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, directed by well-meaning South Africans of all races”. If Avril had been more attuned to her family’s principles, or from Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. However, existence had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a English document,” she stated, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “fair” skin (as Jet put it), she traveled among the Europeans, supported by their admiration for her deceased parent. She presented about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and led the national orchestra in Johannesburg, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” While a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “could introduce a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. Once officials learned of her Black ancestry, she had to depart the nation. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official advised her to leave or be jailed. She came home, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her innocence was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she lamented. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I perceived a familiar story. The narrative of being British until it’s revoked – which recalls African-descended soldiers who defended the British in the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,