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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor continually bore the pressure of her father’s heritage. As the daughter of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous English composers of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s reputation was shrouded in the long shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I reflected on these shadows as I made arrangements to record the world premiere recording of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. With its intense musical themes, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, Avril’s work will offer audiences valuable perspective into how the composer – an artist in conflict who entered the world in 1903 – conceived of her existence as a artist with mixed heritage.

Past and Present

However about legacies. It can take a while to adjust, to perceive forms as they really are, to tell reality from distortion, and I had been afraid to address her history for some time.

I had so wanted Avril to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, she was. The idyllic English tones 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 look at the titles of her family’s music to see how he heard himself as not just a standard-bearer of British Romantic style and also a representative of the African diaspora.

At this point father and daughter seemed to diverge.

American society assessed the composer by the mastery of his art as opposed to the his ethnicity.

Family Background

As a student at the renowned institution, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – started to lean into his African roots. Once the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in that era, the young musician eagerly sought him out. He adapted the poet’s African Romances to music and the following year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral work that made him famous: 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 art as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Success did not reduce his beliefs. In 1900, he was present at the initial Pan African gathering in England where he encountered the African American intellectual the renowned Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, covering the oppression of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner to his final days. He kept connections with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and this leader, gave addresses on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. As for his music, reminisced Du Bois, “he established his reputation so high as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He succumbed in that year, at 37 years old. Yet how might Samuel have made of his child’s choice to be in this country in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Child of Celebrated Artist expresses approval to apartheid system,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the right policy”, the composer stated Jet. When pushed to clarify, she backtracked: she was not in favor with this policy “as a concept” and it “should be allowed to work itself out, guided by good-intentioned residents of every background”. Had Avril been more in tune to her family’s principles, or from segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. But life had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a British passport,” she said, “and the government agents did not inquire me about my race.” Therefore, with her “light” skin (according to the magazine), she moved among the Europeans, supported by their admiration for her deceased parent. She gave a talk about her father’s music at the University of Cape Town and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in Johannesburg, programming the heroic third movement of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” While a confident pianist personally, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Rather, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. After authorities learned of her Black ancestry, she had to depart the country. Her UK document offered no defense, the UK representative advised her to leave or be jailed. She came home, feeling great shame as the magnitude of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a hard one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the printing that year of her controversial discussion, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these shadows, I felt a known narrative. The narrative of identifying as British until you’re not – which recalls African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the English during the second world war and survived only to be denied their due compensation. And the Windrush generation,