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This talented musician constantly felt the burden of her family reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the prominent UK artists of the turn of the 20th century, the composer’s name was enveloped in the lingering obscurity of history.

The First Recording

In recent months, I sat with these shadows as I prepared to produce the inaugural album of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, this piece will offer new listeners deep understanding into how this artist – a composer during war born in 1903 – conceived of her reality as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

Yet about the past. One needs patience to adapt, to recognize outlines as they truly exist, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to address Avril’s past for a period.

I had so wanted her to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, that held. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be detected in many of her works, for example From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to review the headings of her family’s music to see how he viewed himself as not just a champion of English Romanticism and also a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that parent and child appeared to part ways.

American society assessed the composer by the brilliance of his compositions as opposed to the his racial background.

Family Background

While he was studying at the prestigious music college, the composer – the son of a African father and a British mother – started to lean into his African roots. At the time the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in the late 19th century, the 21-year-old composer actively pursued him. He composed the poet’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an international hit, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his music as opposed to the his background.

Principles and Actions

Success did not temper his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in the UK where he encountered the prominent scholar the renowned Du Bois and observed a series of speeches, covering the mistreatment of African people in South Africa. He was an activist until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and Booker T Washington, delivered his own speeches on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the US President during an invitation to the presidential residence in that year. In terms of his art, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in that year, at 37 years old. Yet how might her father have reacted to his offspring’s move to work in South Africa in the 1950s?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Child of Celebrated Artist shows support to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. The system “seems to me the appropriate course”, she informed Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she did not support with apartheid “in principle” and it “should be allowed to resolve itself, guided by benevolent South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or born in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about this system. Yet her life had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she said, “and the officials never asked me about my race.” Thus, with her “light” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her father’s music at the Cape Town university and led the national orchestra in Johannesburg, including the heroic third movement of her composition, named: “In memory of my Father.” While a confident pianist personally, she avoided playing as the soloist in her piece. Instead, she consistently conducted as the leader; and so the orchestra of the era performed under her direction.

Avril hoped, according to her, she “might bring a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. After authorities discovered her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the nation. Her British passport failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner recommended her departure or be jailed. She returned to England, embarrassed as the extent of her innocence was realized. “The realization was a painful one,” she stated. Increasing her embarrassment was the release in 1955 of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these memories, I felt a familiar story. The account of holding UK citizenship until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who fought on behalf of the British during the second world war and lived only to be denied their due compensation. Including those from Windrush,