🔗 Share this article

This talented musician constantly bore the pressure of her parent’s legacy. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent UK artists of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s identity was cloaked in the long shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I got ready to record the inaugural album of her 1936 piano concerto. With its emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and bold rhythms, her composition will grant audiences valuable perspective into how this artist – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her world as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

However about shadows. One needs patience to acclimate, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from misinterpretation, and I felt hesitant to confront the composer’s background for a period.

I deeply hoped Avril to be her father’s daughter. Partially, she was. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be heard in numerous compositions, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to review the headings of her father’s compositions to realize how he viewed himself as not just a flag bearer of English Romanticism and also a representative of the Black diaspora.

This was where Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

The United States evaluated Samuel by the brilliance of his art as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Family Background

While he was studying at the renowned institution, the composer – the son of a African father and a British mother – started to lean into his heritage. When the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in that era, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He set this literary work to music and the following year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral composition that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, particularly among African Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority assessed his work by the quality of his music rather than the his background.

Principles and Actions

Success did not reduce his beliefs. In 1900, he attended the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he encountered the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a series of speeches, covering the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was an activist until the end. He sustained relationships with trailblazers for equality like this intellectual and the educator Washington, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even talked about racial problems with the American leader while visiting to the White House in that year. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in 1912, aged 37. However, how would her father have reacted to his daughter’s decision to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the correct approach”, she informed Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she did not support with apartheid “as a concept” and it “could be left to resolve itself, directed by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or raised in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. Yet her life had protected her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a English document,” she stated, “and the government agents never asked me about my background.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she traveled within European circles, lifted by their admiration for her deceased parent. She presented about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and directed the broadcasting ensemble in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist on her own, she never played as the featured artist in her piece. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “might bring a change”. But by 1954, things fell apart. When government agents became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her British passport didn’t protect her, the diplomatic official recommended her departure or be jailed. She returned to England, embarrassed as the magnitude of her innocence became clear. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she lamented. Increasing her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Familiar Story

As I sat with these legacies, I sensed a recurring theme. The story of identifying as British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK during the second world war and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. Including those from Windrush,