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This talented musician always felt the pressure of her father’s heritage. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK artists of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s identity was cloaked in the long shadows of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I reflected on these shadows as I got ready to make the first-ever recording of her 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, her composition will offer new listeners fascinating insight into how she – a composer during war born in 1903 – envisioned her existence as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about shadows. One needs patience to acclimate, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from distortion, and I had been afraid to face the composer’s background for a while.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, this was true. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the names of her family’s music to realize how he viewed himself as not just a champion of English Romanticism as well as a voice of the African diaspora.

At this point parent and child began to differ.

American society assessed the composer by the excellence of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Parental Heritage

While he was studying at the renowned institution, Samuel – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. Once the poet of color this literary figure came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances into music and the next year adapted his verses for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, notably for Black Americans who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the quality of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Success failed to diminish his activism. During that period, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in London where he met the prominent scholar this influential figure and observed a series of speeches, covering the oppression of African people in South Africa. He remained an advocate to his final days. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on issues of racism with the US President while visiting to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. But what would the composer have made of his offspring’s move to be in this country in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with apartheid “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, overseen by well-meaning people of every background”. Were the composer more aligned to her father’s politics, or raised in segregated America, she might have thought twice about apartheid. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I possess a English document,” she said, “and the officials never asked me about my race.” So, with her “light” complexion (according to the magazine), she floated among the Europeans, supported by their admiration for her late father. She presented about her father’s music at the educational institution and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a skilled pianist on her own, she did not perform as the featured artist in her concerto. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. But by 1954, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents became aware of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the land. Her British passport offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or face arrest. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the extent of her inexperience became clear. “This experience was a difficult one,” she stated. Compounding her embarrassment was the 1955 publication of her controversial discussion, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a known narrative. The account of identifying as British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who defended the English during the second world war and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,