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This talented musician continually bore the weight of her family heritage. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent English composers of the 1900s, her name was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to make the first-ever recording of Avril’s piano concerto from 1936. With its intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant new listeners fascinating insight into how this artist – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – imagined her world as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

However about the past. One needs patience to adapt, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I had been afraid to address the composer’s background for some time.

I deeply hoped her to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, this was true. The rustic British sounds of her father’s impact can be heard in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the titles of her father’s compositions to understand how he identified as not just a standard-bearer of British Romantic style as well as a advocate of the African heritage.

This was where Samuel and Avril began to differ.

The United States judged Samuel by the mastery of his art instead of the colour of his skin.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the renowned institution, Samuel – the child of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – started to lean into his African roots. At the time the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral piece that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an global success, particularly among Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his art instead of the his race.

Principles and Actions

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. During that period, he participated in the pioneering African conference in the UK where he met the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, including on the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even discussed issues of racism with the American leader while visiting to the White House in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so high as a creative artist that it will endure.” He died in the early 20th century, in his thirties. Yet how might Samuel have reacted to his offspring’s move to be in this country in the mid-20th century?

Issues and Stance

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with this policy “in principle” and it “could be left to work itself out, overseen by benevolent people of all races”. Were the composer more aligned to her parent’s beliefs, or born in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. But life had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a UK passport,” she said, “and the officials never asked me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she traveled among the Europeans, lifted by their praise for her deceased parent. She presented about her family’s work at the educational institution and directed the national orchestra in the city, featuring the inspiring part of her concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player on her own, she did not perform as the featured artist in her work. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

She desired, according to her, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. When government agents became aware of her Black ancestry, she had to depart the country. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner advised her to leave or face arrest. She came home, embarrassed as the extent of her naivety dawned. “This experience was a difficult one,” she expressed. Compounding her disgrace was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I felt a known narrative. The narrative of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the English in the second world war and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,