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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always experienced the burden of her family legacy. As the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known English composers of the 1900s, her name was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I sat with these legacies as I got ready to make the inaugural album of Avril’s piano concerto from 1936. Featuring intense musical themes, expressive melodies, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant new listeners fascinating insight into how this artist – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – envisioned her world as a woman of colour.

Shadows and Truth

However about legacies. One needs patience to adapt, to recognize outlines as they actually appear, to distinguish truth from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to address Avril’s past for a while.

I deeply hoped her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, she was. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be heard in several pieces, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to look at the titles of her father’s compositions to see how he viewed himself as both a champion of UK romantic tradition but a advocate of the Black diaspora.

At this point Samuel and Avril began to differ.

White America evaluated Samuel by the brilliance of his art rather than the his ethnicity.

Family Background

During his studies at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the child of a African father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his African roots. When the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances into music and the next year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral composition that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, particularly among Black Americans who felt shared pride as the majority assessed his work by the brilliance of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Fame failed to diminish his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he made the acquaintance of the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and observed a variety of discussions, including on the mistreatment of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner until the end. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights such as this intellectual and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on issues of racism with the American leader on a trip to the presidential residence in that year. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he wrote his name so prominently as a composer that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, aged 37. But what would the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to work in this country in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist gives OK to South African policy,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. The system “struck me as the right policy”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with the system “in principle” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, directed by well-meaning residents of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more in tune to her father’s politics, or from Jim Crow America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. Yet her life had sheltered her.

Background and Inexperience

“I hold a UK passport,” she stated, “and the officials never asked me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as described), she floated within European circles, supported by their acclaim for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and directed the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in the city, featuring the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, named: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a skilled pianist on her own, she never played as the featured artist in her work. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble performed under her direction.

The composer aspired, in her own words, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. After authorities became aware of her mixed background, she had to depart the land. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or be jailed. She returned to England, embarrassed as the extent of her naivety became clear. “The lesson was a painful one,” she stated. Increasing her disgrace was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from South Africa.

A Familiar Story

As I sat with these memories, I sensed a known narrative. The account of being British until it’s challenged – which recalls Black soldiers who fought on behalf of the English during the World War II and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,