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This talented musician always experienced the pressure of her family legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known English musicians of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s identity was cloaked in the long shadows of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these legacies as I got ready to make the world premiere recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, her composition will grant audiences fascinating insight into how this artist – an artist in conflict originating from the early 1900s – imagined her reality as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about the past. It requires time to acclimate, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I was reluctant to face the composer’s background for a period.

I deeply hoped the composer to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, that held. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be detected in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the headings of her parent’s works to realize how he heard himself as both a flag bearer of British Romantic style but a voice of the Black diaspora.

At this point father and daughter seemed to diverge.

White America evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his music instead of the his ethnicity.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, Samuel – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his background. Once the Black American writer this literary figure arrived in England in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He set Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as white America judged Samuel by the quality of his music instead of the his background.

Principles and Actions

Success did not temper his activism. At the turn of the century, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in England where he met the prominent scholar this influential figure and saw a range of talks, including on the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was an activist to his final days. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality including Du Bois and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on equality for all, and even discussed matters of race with the American leader while visiting to the White House in that year. Regarding his compositions, reminisced Du Bois, “he made his mark so notably as a composer that it will endure.” He passed away in the early 20th century, in his thirties. However, how would her father have made of his child’s choice to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the appropriate course”, she informed Jet. When asked to explain, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with the system “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, directed by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. Were the composer more in tune to her family’s principles, or raised in segregated America, she may have reconsidered about the policy. But life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a UK passport,” she stated, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my race.” Thus, with her “fair” skin (as described), she traveled among the Europeans, lifted by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the Cape Town university and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in Johannesburg, including the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, subtitled: “In memory of my Father.” While a confident pianist personally, she did not perform as the lead performer in her piece. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

She desired, in her own words, she “could introduce a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. After authorities became aware of her mixed background, she could no longer stay the nation. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official advised her to leave or be jailed. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the magnitude of her innocence was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she stated. Increasing her humiliation was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

Upon contemplating with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The story of identifying as British until it’s challenged – which recalls Black soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK during the second world war and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,