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This talented musician constantly experienced the weight of her parent’s legacy. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent British musicians of the 1900s, the composer’s name was shrouded in the deep shadows of bygone eras.

A World Premiere

Not long ago, I sat with these memories as I made arrangements to make the first-ever recording of the composer’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and valiant rhythms, this piece will offer new listeners fascinating insight into how she – a wartime composer who entered the world in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about legacies. It can take a while to adapt, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to tell reality from distortion, and I was reluctant to confront the composer’s background for a period.

I earnestly desired Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be detected in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only examine the headings of her parent’s works to realize how he identified as not only a standard-bearer of English Romanticism as well as a voice of the African heritage.

It was here that Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

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

Parental Heritage

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the child of a African father and a white English mother – turned toward his background. Once the poet of color this literary figure arrived in England in the late 19th century, the aspiring artist actively pursued him. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the following year used the poet’s words for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt indirect honor as white America evaluated the composer by the excellence of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not temper his activism. At the turn of the century, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in England where he encountered the Black American thinker this influential figure and saw a range of talks, such as the oppression of the Black community there. He was a campaigner to his final days. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and this leader, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the American leader while visiting to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so high as a composer that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, at 37 years old. But what would the composer have made of his offspring’s move to work in South Africa in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to South African policy,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she revised her statement: she did not support with the system “in principle” and it “should be allowed to resolve itself, overseen by benevolent residents of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more aligned to her parent’s beliefs, or born in segregated America, she could have hesitated about the policy. But life had protected her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I hold a British passport,” she remarked, “and the officials did not inquire me about my race.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” complexion (as Jet put it), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and directed the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, including the bold final section of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Although a accomplished player herself, she did not perform as the soloist in her piece. On the contrary, she invariably directed as the maestro; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

She desired, in her own words, she “could introduce a change”. However, by that year, circumstances deteriorated. Once officials discovered her African heritage, she had to depart the country. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner urged her to go or be jailed. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the extent of her naivety was realized. “The lesson was a painful one,” she expressed. Adding to her humiliation was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I felt a recurring theme. The story of being British until it’s challenged – which recalls troops of color who fought on behalf of the UK during the global conflict and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,