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This talented musician always felt the burden of her parent’s reputation. As the offspring of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous English composers of the 1900s, her reputation was enveloped in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these memories as I made arrangements to record the inaugural album of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and confident beats, this piece will provide new listeners valuable perspective into how the composer – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her existence as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

But here’s the thing about legacies. It requires time to adjust, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to separate fact from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to address Avril’s past for a while.

I had so wanted Avril to be her father’s daughter. Partially, that held. The rustic British sounds of Samuel’s influence can be detected in numerous compositions, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the headings of her father’s compositions to understand how he heard himself as both a champion of UK romantic tradition but a voice of the Black diaspora.

At this point parent and child seemed to diverge.

White America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his music rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

As a student at the Royal College of Music, her father – the son of a African father and a white English mother – began embracing his African roots. Once the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in that era, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He set this literary work to music and the following year adapted his verses for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an worldwide sensation, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the brilliance of his art instead of the his background.

Activism and Politics

Success did not temper his activism. In 1900, he attended the First Pan African Conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, including on the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner throughout his life. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like this intellectual and this leader, gave addresses on racial equality, and even discussed racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so high as a musician that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in that year, aged 37. But what would her father have thought of his offspring’s move to be in this country in the 1950s?

Issues and Stance

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to South African policy,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the right policy”, Avril told Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with this policy “fundamentally” and it “could be left to resolve itself, directed by good-intentioned people of every background”. Had Avril been more attuned to her family’s principles, or from the US under segregation, she might have thought twice about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a English document,” she remarked, “and the government agents never asked me about my race.” So, with her “light” skin (as Jet put it), she moved within European circles, lifted by their acclaim for her deceased parent. She gave a talk about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the national orchestra in the city, featuring the bold final section of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a accomplished player herself, she never played as the lead performer in her piece. Rather, she always led as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “might bring a change”. But by 1954, things fell apart. Once officials became aware of her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the country. Her British passport offered no defense, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or face arrest. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the scale of her naivety became clear. “The realization was a difficult one,” she lamented. Compounding her humiliation was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Familiar Story

While I reflected with these shadows, I sensed a recurring theme. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK throughout the second world war and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,