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Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the pressure of her parent’s legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous English musicians of the 1900s, the composer’s identity was shrouded in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I got ready to produce the first-ever recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will provide music lovers fascinating insight into how this artist – an artist in conflict who entered the world in 1903 – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about the past. It can take a while to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they really are, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to face her history for a period.

I had so wanted the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, she was. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be detected in several pieces, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the titles of her parent’s works to realize how he identified as both a standard-bearer of English Romanticism and also a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

White America assessed the composer by the excellence of his music instead of the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the prestigious music college, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – started to lean into his heritage. When the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral composition that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, particularly among the Black community who felt vicarious pride as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the prominent scholar this influential figure and observed a range of talks, such as the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights including the scholar and the educator Washington, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even discussed racial problems with the American leader during an invitation to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so notably as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. Yet how might Samuel have made of his offspring’s move to work in the African nation in the that decade?

Issues and Stance

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the correct approach”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with this policy “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, overseen by benevolent people of all races”. Had Avril been more in tune to her family’s principles, or raised in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about the policy. But life had shielded her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a English document,” she said, “and the government agents never asked me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (as described), she moved among the Europeans, supported by their acclaim for her late father. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player on her own, she did not perform as the lead performer in her piece. Instead, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “may foster a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. When government agents learned of her mixed background, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the British high commissioner advised her to leave or face arrest. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the scale of her naivety dawned. “This experience was a painful one,” she lamented. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these shadows, I sensed a familiar story. The story of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – which recalls African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK in the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Along with the Windrush era,