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This talented musician continually felt the weight of her father’s heritage. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was cloaked in the long shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these memories as I got ready to record the world premiere recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, her composition will offer new listeners deep understanding into how this artist – a wartime composer born in 1903 – imagined her existence as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

But here’s the thing about legacies. It can take a while to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to confront her history for some time.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, she was. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be detected in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to examine the titles of her family’s music to understand how he heard himself as not only a standard-bearer of UK romantic tradition and also a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

American society evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his music rather than the his racial background.

Family Background

As a student at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a African father and a white English mother – began embracing his background. When the poet of color the renowned Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He set the poet’s African Romances to music and the following year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an global success, particularly among African Americans who felt shared pride as the majority judged Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his race.

Activism and Politics

Success failed to diminish his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in London where he encountered the Black American thinker this influential figure and observed a variety of discussions, such as the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with trailblazers for equality like the scholar and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the US President on a trip to the US capital in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so high as a composer that it will endure.” He passed away in the early 20th century, aged 37. But what would her father have made of his daughter’s decision to be in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she didn’t agree with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, guided by benevolent residents of every background”. Were the composer more aligned to her family’s principles, or raised in Jim Crow America, she might have thought twice about apartheid. However, existence had shielded her.

Background and Inexperience

“I possess a British passport,” she stated, “and the officials failed to question me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, buoyed up by their acclaim for her late father. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and led the broadcasting ensemble in Johannesburg, programming the bold final section of her Piano Concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” While a skilled pianist personally, she avoided playing as the soloist in her piece. Instead, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “may foster a transformation”. However, by that year, circumstances deteriorated. After authorities became aware of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the country. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She went back to the UK, embarrassed as the magnitude of her innocence became clear. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Adding to her embarrassment was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The narrative of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – that brings to mind Black soldiers who defended the British in the global conflict and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,