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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually experienced the weight of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous UK musicians of the 1900s, the composer’s identity was cloaked in the deep shadows of the past.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I made arrangements to record the inaugural album of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, her composition will grant music lovers valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – imagined her world as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to acclimate, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I felt hesitant to face her history for a while.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, she was. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be observed in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the names of her father’s compositions to understand how he viewed himself as not only a flag bearer of UK romantic tradition as well as a voice of the African diaspora.

This was where parent and child seemed to diverge.

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

Parental Heritage

As a student at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the offspring of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – turned toward his heritage. At the time the poet of color this literary figure visited the UK in that era, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He adapted the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the following year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, particularly among Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as American society evaluated the composer by the brilliance of his music rather than the his background.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition failed to diminish his activism. During that period, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, covering the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like Du Bois and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the US President on a trip to the presidential residence in that year. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so prominently as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, aged 37. Yet how might her father have thought of his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the 1950s?

Issues and Stance

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she was not in favor with this policy “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, directed by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more attuned to her family’s principles, or from segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I possess a British passport,” she stated, “and the officials never asked me about my race.” Therefore, with her “light” appearance (as Jet put it), she traveled among the Europeans, lifted by their praise for her deceased parent. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, including the bold final section of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player herself, she never played as the featured artist in her piece. Rather, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “might bring a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. Once officials learned of her mixed background, she had to depart the country. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or face arrest. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her innocence dawned. “This experience was a difficult one,” she expressed. Compounding her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these memories, I felt a known narrative. The account of identifying as British until you’re not – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the British throughout the World War II and made it through but were denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,