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This talented musician continually felt the burden of her parent’s heritage. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known British composers of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s identity was cloaked in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I contemplated these shadows as I prepared to record the world premiere recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its intense musical themes, expressive melodies, and confident beats, Avril’s work will offer music lovers fascinating insight into how the composer – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – conceived of her reality as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about shadows. One needs patience to acclimate, to perceive forms as they really are, to separate fact from distortion, and I had been afraid to face her history for a while.

I earnestly desired the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be detected in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the names of her parent’s works to understand how he identified as not just a champion of British Romantic style and also a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

The United States assessed the composer by the excellence of his music instead of the his racial background.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – began embracing his heritage. At the time the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in that era, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He composed the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, particularly among African Americans who felt vicarious pride as white America assessed his work by the quality of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition did not temper Samuel’s politics. During that period, he attended the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he met the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and saw a variety of discussions, such as the subjugation of the Black community there. He was a campaigner to his final days. He sustained relationships with trailblazers for equality such as the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even discussed racial problems with the US President while visiting to the presidential residence in 1904. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so notably as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He passed away in 1912, at 37 years old. Yet how might her father have made of his offspring’s move to travel to this country in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with the system “as a concept” and it “could be left to run its course, guided by benevolent people of all races”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or raised in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about apartheid. But life had shielded her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a English document,” she remarked, “and the officials never asked me about my background.” Therefore, with her “fair” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved among the Europeans, buoyed up by their admiration for her renowned family member. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and directed the broadcasting ensemble in Johannesburg, including the inspiring part of her concerto, subtitled: “Dedicated to my Father.” Although a confident pianist personally, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Instead, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

The composer aspired, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her mixed background, she was forced to leave the nation. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or be jailed. She came home, embarrassed as the scale of her inexperience dawned. “This experience was a hard one,” she stated. Adding to her embarrassment was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I perceived a recurring theme. The narrative of identifying as British until you’re not – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British during the global conflict and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,