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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always felt the weight of her family reputation. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent English composers of the 1900s, the composer’s reputation was cloaked in the long shadows of the past.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I sat with these legacies as I made arrangements to make the inaugural album of her concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, her composition will offer music lovers fascinating insight into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her existence as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to address Avril’s past for some time.

I had so wanted Avril to be a reflection of her father. To some extent, this was true. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be heard in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the names of her family’s music to see how he viewed himself as not only a standard-bearer of UK romantic tradition but a advocate of the African diaspora.

This was where Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

White America judged Samuel by the mastery of his art instead of the colour of his skin.

Family Background

As a student at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a British mother – began embracing his background. When the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an global success, notably for the Black community who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not reduce his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he met the prominent scholar this influential figure and observed a series of speeches, including on the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and this leader, gave addresses on equality for all, and even discussed racial problems with the American leader on a trip to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, reminisced Du Bois, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He died in 1912, aged 37. However, how would her father have reacted to his child’s choice to work in South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the right policy”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with the system “fundamentally” and it “could be left to run its course, guided by benevolent South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more attuned to her father’s politics, or from the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about this system. But life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a British passport,” she stated, “and the officials never asked me about my race.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as Jet put it), she floated among the Europeans, lifted by their praise for her renowned family member. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the educational institution and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, featuring the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, titled: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a accomplished player on her own, she never played as the featured artist in her piece. Rather, she always led as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the nation. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the UK representative urged her to go or risk imprisonment. She came home, embarrassed as the scale of her naivety dawned. “The lesson was a hard one,” she stated. Increasing her embarrassment was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I perceived a recurring theme. The narrative of identifying as British until you’re not – which recalls troops of color who defended the English during the global conflict and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,