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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the burden of her father’s heritage. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, her reputation was enveloped in the lingering obscurity of the past.

The First Recording

Not long ago, I contemplated these shadows as I got ready to record the world premiere recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, her composition will provide audiences deep understanding into how she – a composer during war born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It requires time to adapt, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to confront her history for a while.

I earnestly desired her to be her father’s daughter. To some extent, she was. The rustic British sounds of her father’s impact can be detected in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to review the titles of her parent’s works to understand how he heard himself as both a champion of English Romanticism but a advocate of the African heritage.

At this point father and daughter appeared to part ways.

The United States evaluated Samuel by the brilliance of his art instead of the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the offspring of a African father and a white English mother – turned toward his African roots. Once the poet of color this literary figure came to London in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He composed this literary work as a composition and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success did not temper his beliefs. During that period, he attended the pioneering African conference in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and saw a variety of discussions, including on the oppression of the Black community there. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality such as this intellectual and this leader, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even discussed issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt during an invitation to the White House in 1904. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so notably as a creative artist that it will long be remembered.” He died in that year, in his thirties. However, how would the composer have made of his daughter’s decision to work in the African nation in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist shows support to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she did not support with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, overseen by good-intentioned residents of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or from the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about this system. But life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a UK passport,” she said, “and the authorities never asked me about my background.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she traveled alongside white society, supported by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and led the broadcasting ensemble in that location, including the inspiring part of her composition, titled: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a confident pianist personally, she never played as the soloist in her work. Instead, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. Once officials became aware of her mixed background, she could no longer stay the land. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the UK representative advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She came home, embarrassed as the magnitude of her inexperience dawned. “The lesson was a painful one,” she lamented. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from the country.

A Familiar Story

While I reflected with these legacies, I felt a known narrative. The story of being British until it’s revoked – that brings to mind troops of color who defended the British throughout the global conflict and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,