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This talented musician continually felt the burden of her parent’s heritage. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous English composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s name was enveloped in the deep shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these memories as I got ready to produce the first-ever recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, this piece will provide audiences deep understanding into how the composer – an artist in conflict originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her reality as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

However about shadows. It requires time to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they really are, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I felt hesitant to face the composer’s background for a while.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, she was. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be heard in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to review the headings of her father’s compositions to see how he heard himself as not only a flag bearer of British Romantic style but a advocate of the African diaspora.

At this point father and daughter began to differ.

American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his music instead of the colour of his skin.

Family Background

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, her father – the son of a African father and a British mother – started to lean into his background. At the time the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the following year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Fame did not reduce his activism. At the turn of the century, he was present at the First Pan African Conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual WEB Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, including on the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He remained an advocate until the end. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights like Du Bois and this leader, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with the US President while visiting to the US capital in that year. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in 1912, in his thirties. But what would her father have thought of his offspring’s move to work in South Africa in the mid-20th century?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to apartheid system,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with this policy “as a concept” and it “could be left to work itself out, guided by well-meaning South Africans of all races”. Were the composer more attuned to her father’s politics, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about the policy. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a UK passport,” she stated, “and the authorities failed to question me about my race.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she floated among the Europeans, buoyed up by their admiration for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and directed the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, programming the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” While a accomplished player on her own, she did not perform as the lead performer in her work. Rather, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

The composer aspired, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. After authorities learned of her African heritage, she could no longer stay the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the extent of her inexperience was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Familiar Story

As I sat with these shadows, I perceived a recurring theme. The narrative of being British until it’s challenged – one that calls to mind troops of color who served for the UK in the global conflict and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,