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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly bore the weight of her father’s legacy. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known UK composers of the 1900s, the composer’s reputation was cloaked in the long shadows of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I sat with these memories as I prepared to record the first-ever recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. With its emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, her composition will provide new listeners valuable perspective into how this artist – a composer during war born in 1903 – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

However about shadows. It requires time to adapt, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from distortion, and I was reluctant to address the composer’s background for a period.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, that held. The idyllic English tones of her father’s impact can be observed in numerous compositions, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the names of her father’s compositions to see how he identified as not only a champion of British Romantic style as well as a advocate of the African heritage.

This was where Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

White America assessed the composer by the excellence of his art instead of the his racial background.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the prestigious music college, the composer – the offspring of a African father and a white English mother – started to lean into his African roots. At the time the African American poet the renowned Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He set this literary work into music and the following year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as white America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his music instead of the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success did not reduce his activism. At the turn of the century, he was present at the pioneering African conference in England where he encountered the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a series of speeches, such as the oppression of African people in South Africa. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as the scholar and this leader, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even discussed racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt on a trip to the US capital in that year. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so notably as a musician that it will endure.” He died in 1912, aged 37. Yet how might the composer have made of his child’s choice to work in South Africa in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to apartheid system,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “could be left to run its course, overseen by good-intentioned South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more in tune to her family’s principles, or born in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about this system. Yet her life had shielded her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a English document,” she said, “and the officials failed to question me about my background.” So, with her “fair” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their admiration for her late father. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Rather, she always led as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

She desired, in her own words, she “might bring a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. When government agents discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the country. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the UK representative urged her to go or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her naivety dawned. “The realization was a difficult one,” she stated. Increasing her disgrace was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I perceived a familiar story. The narrative of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British during the World War II and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,