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The composer Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the burden of her father’s heritage. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the most famous UK composers of the 1900s, Avril’s identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

The First Recording

Earlier this year, I contemplated these legacies as I got ready to record the inaugural album of her piano concerto from 1936. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and bold rhythms, her composition will offer audiences fascinating insight into how she – a composer during war born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Past and Present

Yet about the past. One needs patience to adjust, to perceive forms as they truly exist, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to confront her history for a period.

I earnestly desired the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be heard in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the names of her family’s music to understand how he identified as both a champion of UK romantic tradition but a voice of the African heritage.

At this point parent and child appeared to part ways.

White America evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his art instead of the his racial background.

Samuel’s African Roots

During his studies at the prestigious music college, her father – the child of a parent from Sierra Leone and a Caucasian parent – turned toward his African roots. When the African American poet the renowned Dunbar arrived in England in that era, the aspiring artist eagerly sought him out. He set the poet’s African Romances to music and the following year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral composition that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an international hit, especially with Black Americans who felt indirect honor as white America assessed his work by the brilliance of his art as opposed to the his race.

Principles and Actions

Success did not reduce his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the pioneering African conference in London where he made the acquaintance of the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and observed a range of talks, including on the mistreatment of African people in South Africa. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders like this intellectual and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the US capital in that year. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he made his mark so prominently as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in the early 20th century, at 37 years old. But what would Samuel have made of his child’s choice to travel to South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist gives OK to apartheid system,” declared a title in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the appropriate course”, she informed Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she didn’t agree with apartheid “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to work itself out, overseen by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more attuned to her father’s politics, or born in the US under segregation, she could have hesitated about apartheid. Yet her life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities failed to question me about my ethnicity.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” skin (according to the magazine), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their acclaim for her renowned family member. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the educational institution and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, programming the bold final section of her composition, named: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player personally, she never played as the featured artist in her concerto. Rather, she always led as the maestro; and so the orchestra of the era followed her lead.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “might bring a shift”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. After authorities learned of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the UK representative urged her to go or be jailed. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the scale of her naivety became clear. “The realization was a painful one,” she stated. Compounding her humiliation was the release in 1955 of her controversial discussion, a year after her unceremonious exit from the country.

A Familiar Story

While I reflected with these legacies, I sensed a familiar story. The narrative of identifying as British until you’re not – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK throughout the World War II and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,