Stepping from Obscurity: Why Avril Coleridge-Taylor Deserves to Be Heard

This talented musician always experienced the weight of her family reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent English composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s reputation was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these legacies as I got ready to produce the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Featuring emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and bold rhythms, this piece will provide new listeners valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her world as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about legacies. One needs patience to adapt, to recognize outlines as they really are, to distinguish truth from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to confront her history for a period.

I had so wanted her to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, this was true. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be observed in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the titles of her family’s music to understand how he heard himself as not only a flag bearer of English Romanticism but a advocate of the African heritage.

This was where father and daughter appeared to part ways.

White America judged Samuel by the mastery of his art instead of the his racial background.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, Samuel – the child of a African father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his African roots. Once the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He set this literary work into music and the next year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, notably for Black Americans who felt indirect honor as American society evaluated the composer by the quality of his art rather than the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success did not temper Samuel’s politics. At the turn of the century, he was present at the pioneering African conference in the UK where he encountered the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and saw a variety of discussions, such as the oppression of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate to his final days. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights including this intellectual and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on equality for all, and even talked about racial problems with the American leader while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in that year, in his thirties. Yet how might Samuel have thought of his offspring’s move to work in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she was not in favor with apartheid “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, guided by well-meaning people of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or raised in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about the policy. Yet her life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she said, “and the government agents did not inquire me about my background.” So, with her “fair” complexion (as Jet put it), she traveled within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her late father. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, including the heroic third movement of her composition, titled: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a confident pianist personally, she never played as the soloist in her piece. Instead, she invariably directed as the maestro; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “might bring a shift”. But by 1954, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials learned of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her British passport offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, feeling great shame as the scale of her naivety became clear. “The lesson was a painful one,” she expressed. Increasing her disgrace was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these shadows, I sensed a recurring theme. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – that brings to mind Black soldiers who defended the English during the global conflict and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,