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This talented musician continually felt the weight of her father’s legacy. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent English artists of the early 20th century, the composer’s identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I contemplated these legacies as I got ready to record the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. With its impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, her composition will provide music lovers valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about shadows. One needs patience to adapt, to perceive forms as they really are, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to face Avril’s past for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be her father’s daughter. To some extent, that held. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the names of her family’s music to understand how he identified as both a champion of English Romanticism as well as a voice of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

White America evaluated Samuel by the excellence of his music instead of the colour of his skin.

Family Background

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – turned toward his background. At the time the African American poet this literary figure visited the UK in that era, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the next year adapted his verses for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, notably for Black Americans who felt shared pride as white America assessed his work by the quality of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not temper Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he was present at the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he encountered the African American intellectual this influential figure and observed a range of talks, including on the subjugation of the Black community there. He was a campaigner until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including the scholar and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even discussed racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the presidential residence in that year. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He passed away in the early 20th century, in his thirties. However, how would Samuel have reacted to his offspring’s move to be in South Africa in the that decade?

Issues and Stance

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, directed by benevolent people of every background”. Were the composer more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I possess a UK passport,” she stated, “and the authorities never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, supported by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and directed the national orchestra in that location, featuring the heroic third movement of her composition, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player personally, she avoided playing as the soloist in her piece. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, things fell apart. When government agents discovered her Black ancestry, she had to depart the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative recommended her departure or face arrest. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her naivety was realized. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her forced leaving from the country.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The account of being British until it’s challenged – that brings to mind Black soldiers who served for the UK in the second world war and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,