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This talented musician continually experienced the weight of her parent’s reputation. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the best-known UK composers of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s identity was enveloped in the deep shadows of the past.

A World Premiere

Earlier this year, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to make the first-ever recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, this piece will offer music lovers deep understanding into how this artist – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – imagined her reality as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about the past. One needs patience to adapt, to recognize outlines as they really are, to distinguish truth from misrepresentation, and I had been afraid to face the composer’s background for some time.

I deeply hoped Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, this was true. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in numerous compositions, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the titles of her father’s compositions to realize how he heard himself as not only a standard-bearer of British Romantic style as well as a representative of the Black diaspora.

It was here that parent and child appeared to part ways.

The United States assessed the composer by the excellence of his compositions instead of the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his heritage. At the time the African American poet this literary figure came to London in that era, the young musician was keen to meet him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances into music and the next year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came 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 worldwide sensation, particularly among African Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his music as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success did not reduce his activism. At the turn of the century, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he met the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, covering the mistreatment of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders including this intellectual and this leader, gave addresses on racial equality, and even discussed racial problems with the US President during an invitation to the US capital in 1904. In terms of his art, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so notably as a composer that it will endure.” He succumbed in the early 20th century, aged 37. However, how would Samuel have thought of his offspring’s move to travel to this country in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to apartheid system,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “seems to me the appropriate course”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she was not in favor with this policy “as a concept” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, directed by benevolent people of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. But life had sheltered her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my race.” So, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as Jet put it), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their acclaim for her late father. She presented about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, including the heroic third movement of her composition, titled: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player on her own, she avoided playing as the soloist in her piece. Rather, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

She desired, according to her, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, things fell apart. After authorities learned of her African heritage, she had to depart the nation. Her UK document didn’t protect her, the British high commissioner urged her to go or face arrest. She returned to England, feeling great shame as the extent of her inexperience was realized. “This experience was a difficult one,” she stated. Compounding her embarrassment was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these memories, I felt a familiar story. The story of being British until it’s challenged – which recalls African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK in the second world war and survived only to be refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,