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Avril Coleridge-Taylor constantly experienced the burden of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent English artists of the 1900s, the composer’s name was shrouded in the lingering obscurity of history.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I contemplated these legacies as I prepared to record the first-ever recording of the composer’s piano concerto from 1936. With its intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and bold rhythms, her composition will provide audiences deep understanding into how this artist – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her reality as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

However about shadows. One needs patience to adjust, to see shapes as they really are, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to face the composer’s background for some time.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of her father’s impact can be observed in numerous compositions, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to examine the titles of her father’s compositions to understand how he viewed himself as not only a standard-bearer of UK romantic tradition as well as a voice of the Black diaspora.

This was where parent and child appeared to part ways.

American society evaluated Samuel by the brilliance of his art instead of the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

During his studies at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a African father and a Caucasian parent – turned toward his background. When the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar visited the UK in the late 19th century, the young musician actively pursued him. He composed the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an worldwide sensation, particularly among Black Americans who felt indirect honor as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Recognition did not temper his beliefs. During that period, he attended the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he met the Black American thinker the renowned Du Bois and observed a range of talks, covering the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and the educator Washington, gave addresses on equality for all, and even discussed matters of race with the US President while visiting to the White House in 1904. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so high as a composer that it will endure.” He died in 1912, aged 37. However, how would Samuel have made of his daughter’s decision to be in the African nation in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to apartheid system,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with this policy “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, directed by benevolent residents of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. But life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my race.” Thus, with her “fair” appearance (as described), she floated among the Europeans, lifted by their admiration for her deceased parent. 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, programming the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” Although a confident pianist herself, she never played as the soloist in her piece. Rather, she invariably directed as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. But by 1954, things fell apart. Once officials became aware of her mixed background, she could no longer stay the nation. Her citizenship didn’t protect her, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She came home, feeling great shame as the extent of her naivety dawned. “This experience was a difficult one,” she stated. Adding to her embarrassment was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these memories, I felt a known narrative. The narrative of identifying as British until it’s challenged – one that calls to mind troops of color who defended the English throughout the global conflict and made it through but were denied their due compensation. Along with the Windrush era,