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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always experienced the pressure of her parent’s legacy. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent UK composers of the turn of the 20th century, her identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these memories as I prepared to record the inaugural album of her piano concerto from 1936. Featuring emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, Avril’s work will provide audiences valuable perspective into how this artist – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to face her history for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be observed in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to examine the titles of her father’s compositions to realize how he heard himself as both a flag bearer of English Romanticism and also a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

The United States evaluated Samuel by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Family Background

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. Once the Black American writer this literary figure came to London in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer was keen to meet him. He composed this literary work as a composition and the subsequent year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, particularly among the Black community who felt shared pride as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Fame failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. During that period, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual this influential figure and observed a series of speeches, such as the subjugation of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate until the end. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality including this intellectual and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt on a trip to the White House in 1904. Regarding his compositions, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so notably as a musician that it will endure.” He died in that year, aged 37. But what would the composer have made of his daughter’s decision to be in South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Daughter of Famous Composer shows support to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the correct approach”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with this policy “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, guided by good-intentioned South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or raised in segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. But life had protected her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a English document,” she said, “and the authorities failed to question me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as Jet put it), she traveled among the Europeans, supported by their admiration for her renowned family member. She gave a talk about her family’s work at the University of Cape Town and directed the national orchestra in Johannesburg, featuring the bold final section of her Piano Concerto, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Although a skilled pianist personally, she avoided playing as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she always led as the maestro; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

She desired, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. But by 1954, things fell apart. When government agents became aware of her mixed background, she was forced to leave the land. Her British passport offered no defense, the UK representative advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, embarrassed as the scale of her inexperience dawned. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she lamented. Increasing her embarrassment was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these shadows, I perceived a known narrative. The story of identifying as British until you’re not – that brings to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the English during the World War II and survived only to be refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,