Out of the Shadows: Why Avril Coleridge-Taylor deserves to be heard | classical music

AFriel Coleridge Taylor always felt the weight of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge Taylor, one of the most famous British composers of the early 20th century, Avril’s name has been shrouded in the long shadow of history.

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to record the world premiere of Avril’s 1936 Piano Concerto with the BBC Orchestra. With its spirited harmonies, soulful lyricism, and gritty rhythms, Avril’s work will give new listeners a fascinating insight into how she — a wartime composer, born in 1903 — envisioned her world as a woman of color.

But that’s the thing about shadows. It might take some time to adjust, to see the shapes as they really are, to distinguish between truth and distortion, and I was afraid to face Avril’s past for a while.

I wanted her so badly to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, it was. Samuel’s influence on English pastoral paintings can be heard in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscapes (1940). But you only have to look at the titles of her father’s books to see how he heard himself not just as the flag-bearer of English Romanticism, but as the voice of the African diaspora.

This was where father and daughter seemed to drift apart.

While studying at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the son of a Sierra Leonean father and a white English mother – began to lean towards his African roots. When African-American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer sought him out eagerly. He set music to Dunbar’s African Romances The following year, he used the poet’s words in the opera Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Song of Hiawatha was an international hit, especially among African Americans who felt vicarious pride when white America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his music rather than the color of his skin.

Fame did not moderate Samuel’s politics. In 1900, he attended the First African Congress in London where he met the African-American intellectual Webb Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, including on the oppression of blacks in South Africa. He was an activist until the end. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders such as Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, gave his own speeches on racial equality, and even discussed issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt during an invitation to the White House in 1904. As for his music, Du Bois recalls, “he set his name high as a creative artist who would not soon be forgotten.” He died in 1912 at the age of 37. But what would Samuel make of his daughter’s decision to work in South Africa in the 1950s?

“Famous Composer’s Daughter Gives Approval of African Prejudice,” ran a headline in the black American publishing magazine Jet. Avril told Jet that segregation “seems to me like the right policy.” When asked to clarify, she backtracked: she did not agree with apartheid “in principle” and “should be allowed to operate on its own, under the direction of well-meaning South Africans of all races.” If Avril had been more aligned with her father’s politics, or had been born in Jim Crow America, she might have thought twice about segregation. But life was protecting her.

“I have a British passport, and the officials never asked me about my ethnicity,” she said. Thus, she floated among Europeans with her “porcelain white” skin (as Jett put it), and was enlivened by their praise of her late father. She lectured on her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, where she programmed the heroic third movement of the Piano Concerto, In Memory of My Father. Although a confident pianist, she never played the soloist role in her concertos. Instead, she always led as a conductor. And so the apartheid orchestra played under its baton.

Avril, in her words, expressed her hope to “make a difference.” But by 1954, things had fallen apart. Once officials learned of her African heritage, she could no longer remain in the country. Her British passport did not protect her, and the British High Commissioner advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She returned to England feeling extremely ashamed when her naivety became apparent. “The lesson was difficult,” she said regretfully. Adding to her humiliation was the publication of her ill-fated 1955 plane interview a year later after Her unofficial exit from South Africa.

As I sat with these shadows, I felt a familiar story. The story of being British to being British – a story reminiscent of the soldiers of African descent who fought on behalf of the British during World War II, only to survive but be denied due compensation. And the Windrush generation, who built post-war Britain from the rubble, but still face legal challenges over their relationship with the only place they called home.

In the aftermath, Avril thought about her father and the “tremendous faith he had for colored people in the world.” She wrote an article titled “Celebratory March” (1957) for Ghana’s independence. Its memorial overtones have much in common with the evocative and melancholic Memoriam: To the RAF (1945). In Memoriam (1967), which she later dedicated to her brother Hiawatha upon his death in 1980, as well as to her father.

Samuel Averill was endowed with a sense of belonging to the world, and she took that to heart – for the better and for the better For the worse. She could have made life easier for herself in South Africa by hiding her African heritage and the Coleridge-Taylor name. But she embraced everything she was, and that extended to her music. The concerto movement dedicated to her father bursts with bold symphonic tones that insist, “Here I am.”

If we want to hear Britain’s black and mixed-race history as it was, we must sit down long enough to see that the shadows of the past need not be feared if we are to learn from them.