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Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the burden of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent UK artists of the 1900s, the composer’s name was shrouded in the long shadows of the past.

The First Recording

Not long ago, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to produce the world premiere recording of her piano concerto from 1936. With its emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will offer audiences fascinating insight into how this artist – a wartime composer born in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about shadows. One needs patience to adapt, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to face Avril’s past for a period.

I had so wanted the composer to be her father’s daughter. To some extent, she was. The idyllic English tones of Samuel’s influence can be detected in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the headings of her father’s compositions to realize how he viewed himself as both a champion of English Romanticism and also a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

The United States assessed the composer by the brilliance of his compositions instead of the his racial background.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the prestigious music college, Samuel – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – turned toward his background. When the Black American writer this literary figure came to London in 1897, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the next year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an global success, notably for African Americans who felt indirect honor as white America assessed his work by the quality of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. During that period, he participated in the initial Pan African gathering in London where he made the acquaintance of the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and observed a range of talks, covering the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was an activist until the end. He sustained relationships with early civil rights leaders such as the scholar and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the White House in 1904. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so high as a musician that it will long be remembered.” He succumbed in that year, aged 37. Yet how might her father have thought of his daughter’s decision to travel to this country in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to South African policy,” declared a title in the community journal Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the right policy”, she informed Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she did not support with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, directed by benevolent residents of all races”. If Avril had been more attuned to her family’s principles, or born in Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about this system. Yet her life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a English document,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “fair” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved within European circles, buoyed up by their praise for her late father. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and directed the broadcasting ensemble in that location, featuring the bold final section of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a confident pianist herself, she did not perform as the soloist in her piece. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the orchestra of the era played under her baton.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “could introduce a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she was forced to leave the land. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She came home, embarrassed as the scale of her inexperience was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she stated. Increasing her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I felt a familiar story. The story of being British until you’re not – that brings to mind troops of color who served for the English in the global conflict and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,