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Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually felt the burden of her family heritage. As the daughter of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the prominent British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, her identity was shrouded in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I contemplated these memories as I made arrangements to record the inaugural album of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. With its emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant music lovers valuable perspective into how the composer – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – envisioned her world as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

However about the past. It can take a while to adjust, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to face the composer’s background for a while.

I had so wanted her to be her father’s daughter. To some extent, that held. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be detected in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the titles of her father’s compositions to realize how he viewed himself as not just a standard-bearer of English Romanticism but a voice of the Black diaspora.

This was where father and daughter appeared to part ways.

American society judged Samuel by the mastery of his music instead of the his ethnicity.

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 – turned toward his background. At the time the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, particularly among Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition did not reduce his activism. In 1900, he attended the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual this influential figure and witnessed a series of speeches, including on the mistreatment of the Black community there. He was an activist until the end. He maintained ties with trailblazers for equality like the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even talked about racial problems with the American leader during an invitation to the White House in 1904. Regarding his compositions, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so notably as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in that year, in his thirties. But what would her father have reacted to his daughter’s decision to travel to the African nation in the mid-20th century?

Issues and Stance

“Child of Celebrated Artist shows support to South African policy,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with the system “fundamentally” and it “could be left to work itself out, directed by good-intentioned South Africans of all races”. Had Avril been more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in segregated America, she may have reconsidered about this system. But life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a British passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities failed to question me about my race.” Thus, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their admiration for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in that location, including the heroic third movement of her composition, subtitled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist herself, she did not perform as the featured artist in her piece. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “may foster a change”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. When government agents learned of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the nation. Her UK document failed to safeguard her, the UK representative advised her to leave or be jailed. She came home, deeply ashamed as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a painful one,” she lamented. Compounding her disgrace was the release in 1955 of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from the country.

A Recurring Theme

Upon contemplating with these legacies, I perceived a familiar story. The story of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – which recalls African-descended soldiers who defended the British in the second world war and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Along with the Windrush era,