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This talented musician constantly bore the pressure of her father’s heritage. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the most famous English musicians of the turn of the 20th century, her reputation was shrouded in the deep shadows of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I sat with these shadows as I made arrangements to record the inaugural album of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, this piece will grant audiences valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – imagined her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Shadows and Truth

However about shadows. One needs patience to adapt, to see shapes as they really are, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to address Avril’s past for some time.

I earnestly desired Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, that held. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be detected in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the titles of her family’s music to understand how he viewed himself as both a standard-bearer of British Romantic style as well as a representative of the African heritage.

This was where parent and child appeared to part ways.

The United States assessed the composer by the brilliance of his art rather than the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the renowned institution, her father – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – began embracing his background. When the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He set the poet’s African Romances into music and the next year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, particularly among the Black community who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the quality of his art instead of the his race.

Activism and Politics

Fame did not reduce Samuel’s politics. During that period, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he met the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and saw a series of speeches, including on the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was an activist throughout his life. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights such as the scholar and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even discussed issues of racism with the US President on a trip to the White House in that year. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so high as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, in his thirties. But what would the composer have reacted to his child’s choice to work in this country in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to South African policy,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “seems to me the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with this policy “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, directed by benevolent people of every background”. If Avril had been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about the policy. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my race.” Thus, with her “fair” skin (as described), she moved alongside white society, buoyed up by their acclaim for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and directed the broadcasting ensemble in the city, including the inspiring part of her composition, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player personally, she never played as the featured artist in her work. Rather, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra played under her baton.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “may foster a change”. However, by that year, things fell apart. After authorities became aware of her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative advised her to leave or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her innocence became clear. “This experience was a painful one,” she stated. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these shadows, I perceived a familiar story. The account of identifying as British until you’re not – that brings to mind troops of color who served for the English during the global conflict and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Including those from Windrush,