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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor always experienced the weight of her parent’s reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent English artists of the turn of the 20th century, her identity was enveloped in the long shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I contemplated these legacies as I prepared to produce the world premiere recording of her 1936 piano concerto. Featuring intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, her composition will grant music lovers fascinating insight into how she – a composer during war originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.

Legacy and Reality

But here’s the thing about the past. One needs patience to adapt, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from misinterpretation, and I felt hesitant to address Avril’s past for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be her father’s daughter. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be observed in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the titles of her family’s music to realize how he heard himself as both a champion of English Romanticism as well as a voice of the African heritage.

It was here that father and daughter seemed to diverge.

American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions rather than the his racial background.

Parental Heritage

While he was studying at the renowned institution, the composer – the offspring of a Sierra Leonean father and a Caucasian parent – began embracing his heritage. When the Black American writer the renowned Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He set this literary work as a composition and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral piece that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an global success, notably for Black Americans who felt vicarious pride as American society assessed his work by the quality of his music as opposed to the his background.

Principles and Actions

Success did not reduce his beliefs. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in England where he met the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, including on the subjugation of Black South Africans. He remained an advocate throughout his life. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like Du Bois and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on equality for all, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the US President during an invitation to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so high as a composer that it will endure.” He died in that year, in his thirties. Yet how might her father have thought of his daughter’s decision to be in this country in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist shows support to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the correct approach”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she did not support with the system “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, overseen by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. Were the composer more in tune to her family’s principles, or raised in the US under segregation, she might have thought twice about this system. However, existence had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a British passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents never asked me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “light” appearance (as Jet put it), she floated within European circles, lifted by their acclaim for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, including the heroic third movement of her concerto, subtitled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player on her own, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Instead, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

She desired, as she stated, she “may foster a shift”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. When government agents became aware of her mixed background, she had to depart the nation. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or be jailed. She came home, embarrassed as the scale of her naivety became clear. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she expressed. Adding to her humiliation was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Familiar Story

Upon contemplating with these shadows, I felt a recurring theme. The account of identifying as British until it’s revoked – which recalls troops of color who served for the UK throughout the global conflict and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,