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Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly bore the weight of her family heritage. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known British artists of the early 20th century, Avril’s name was shrouded in the deep shadows of history.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these memories as I got ready to record the first-ever recording of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring intense musical themes, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, her composition will offer new listeners deep understanding into how she – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about legacies. It can take a while to adjust, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to address the composer’s background for some time.

I earnestly desired the composer to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, that held. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be observed in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the names of her father’s compositions to see how he heard himself as not only a flag bearer of British Romantic style but a representative of the Black diaspora.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

White America judged Samuel by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the prestigious music college, the composer – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – started to lean into his background. At the time the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as white America judged Samuel by the quality of his music instead of the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Fame did not temper his activism. In 1900, he attended the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he encountered the African American intellectual this influential figure and witnessed a range of talks, including on the subjugation of the Black community there. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as Du Bois and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on racial problems with the American leader during an invitation to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in that year, aged 37. But what would Samuel have made of his offspring’s move to travel to the African nation in the mid-20th century?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to apartheid system,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she was not in favor with the system “in principle” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, directed by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more aligned to her family’s principles, or raised in segregated America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a British passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “light” skin (as described), she moved within European circles, 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 national orchestra in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” Although a accomplished player herself, she avoided playing as the soloist in her work. On the contrary, she always led as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “may foster a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials discovered her mixed background, she was forced to leave the country. Her UK document offered no defense, the British high commissioner urged her to go or be jailed. She came home, embarrassed as the magnitude of her inexperience dawned. “The lesson was a painful one,” she lamented. Increasing her disgrace was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I sensed a familiar story. The account of identifying as British until you’re not – which recalls troops of color who fought on behalf of the English throughout the second world war and survived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,