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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the weight of her parent’s legacy. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK musicians of the 1900s, her name was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of the past.

An Inaugural Recording

Not long ago, I contemplated these legacies as I made arrangements to make the first-ever recording of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting emotional harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, Avril’s work will provide music lovers fascinating insight into how this artist – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – conceived of her existence as a female composer of color.

Shadows and Truth

But here’s the thing about shadows. It requires time to adapt, to see shapes as they truly exist, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to confront Avril’s past for some time.

I deeply hoped the composer to be her father’s daughter. In some ways, this was true. The rustic British sounds of parental inspiration can be detected in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only review the titles of her father’s compositions to realize how he identified as not only a standard-bearer of English Romanticism but a representative of the African diaspora.

This was where parent and child seemed to diverge.

The United States assessed the composer by the excellence of his art as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the renowned institution, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his background. When the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He set this literary work into music and the subsequent year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as the majority assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Fame did not temper his activism. At the turn of the century, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in London where he encountered the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, including on the mistreatment of the Black community there. He was a campaigner until the end. He kept connections with trailblazers for equality such as this intellectual and this leader, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even talked about racial problems with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the US capital in that year. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so notably as a creative artist that it will endure.” He died in that year, aged 37. Yet how might Samuel have reacted to his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the mid-20th century?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician gives OK to S African Bias,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “appeared to me the appropriate course”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she didn’t agree with apartheid “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, directed by good-intentioned people of every background”. Had Avril been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about this system. Yet her life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she remarked, “and the officials failed to question me about my background.” Therefore, with her “light” complexion (as described), she moved among the Europeans, lifted by their admiration for her renowned family member. She presented about her father’s music at the educational institution and conducted the national orchestra in the city, featuring the bold final section of her concerto, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a confident pianist herself, she did not perform as the soloist in her concerto. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the segregated ensemble performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. Yet in the mid-1950s, things fell apart. After authorities discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the nation. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the UK representative urged her to go or be jailed. She returned to England, feeling great shame as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a painful one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these legacies, I felt a known narrative. The story of holding UK citizenship until you’re not – one that calls to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the English in the World War II and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,