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Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the weight of her father’s heritage. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s name was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of the past.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I sat with these memories as I made arrangements to make the inaugural album of her piano concerto from 1936. Featuring intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, this piece will provide new listeners fascinating insight into how she – a wartime composer born in 1903 – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about shadows. One needs patience to adjust, to see shapes as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I had been afraid to face the composer’s background for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, that held. The idyllic English tones of her father’s impact can be observed in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the names of her father’s compositions to understand how he identified as both a flag bearer of British Romantic style but a representative of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

White America judged Samuel by the mastery of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the renowned institution, Samuel – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – started to lean into his background. When the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in that era, the aspiring artist 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. This was followed by the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Fame did not temper his activism. During that period, he attended the pioneering African conference in London where he met the African American intellectual this influential figure and observed a range of talks, covering the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with trailblazers for equality including this intellectual and this leader, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even discussed issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the presidential residence in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so high as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in 1912, aged 37. Yet how might her father have thought of his daughter’s decision to be in South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the appropriate course”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she qualified her remarks: she was not in favor with this policy “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, guided by good-intentioned people of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more aligned to her father’s politics, or born in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had shielded her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents failed to question me about my race.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (according to the magazine), she moved within European circles, supported by their admiration for her renowned family member. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the educational institution and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, including the bold final section of her composition, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a skilled pianist on her own, she never played as the soloist in her concerto. Rather, she consistently conducted as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

She desired, according to her, she “may foster a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, the situation collapsed. When government agents learned of her mixed background, she had to depart the nation. Her British passport offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the scale of her inexperience was realized. “The realization was a hard one,” she expressed. Compounding her embarrassment was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these legacies, I perceived a familiar story. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who served for the English during the global conflict and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,