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This talented musician continually bore the burden of her father’s legacy. As the daughter of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known UK musicians of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s name was enveloped in the deep shadows of history.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these legacies as I made arrangements to produce the first-ever recording of Avril’s concerto for piano composed in 1936. Boasting intense musical themes, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, Avril’s work will grant audiences deep understanding into how she – a composer during war originating from the early 1900s – envisioned her existence as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

However about legacies. It can take a while to acclimate, to see shapes as they truly exist, to distinguish truth from misrepresentation, and I felt hesitant to face her history for some time.

I had so wanted the composer to be following in her father’s footsteps. In some ways, she was. The rustic British sounds of her father’s impact can be detected in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the headings of her parent’s works to see how he identified as both a flag bearer of British Romantic style but a voice of the African diaspora.

At this point father and daughter seemed to diverge.

American society judged Samuel by the brilliance of his compositions instead of the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the renowned institution, her father – the child of a African father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his background. Once the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in that era, the young musician was keen to meet him. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances into music and the subsequent year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral composition that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an global success, notably for Black Americans who felt shared pride as white America evaluated the composer by the excellence of his art rather than the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Recognition failed to diminish his beliefs. In 1900, he attended the pioneering African conference in London where he made the acquaintance of the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and observed a range of talks, covering the oppression of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders such as the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on racial equality, and even talked about issues of racism with the American leader while visiting to the White House in 1904. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so notably as a composer that it will long be remembered.” He passed away in that year, in his thirties. Yet how might the composer have reacted to his daughter’s decision to be in the African nation in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer expresses approval to S African Bias,” appeared as a heading in the community journal Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the appropriate course”, Avril told Jet. Upon further questioning, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with the system “in principle” and it “should be allowed to resolve itself, guided by benevolent South Africans of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more in tune to her parent’s beliefs, or from segregated America, she may have reconsidered about apartheid. However, existence had sheltered her.

Heritage and Innocence

“I possess a British passport,” she said, “and the officials failed to question me about my race.” Thus, with her “light” complexion (as described), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her renowned family member. She gave a talk about her family’s work at the University of Cape Town and directed the national orchestra in Johannesburg, including the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, subtitled: “Dedicated to my Father.” Although a skilled pianist on her own, she never played as the lead performer in her concerto. Rather, she always led as the leader; and so the apartheid orchestra performed under her direction.

She desired, according to her, she “might bring a transformation”. But by 1954, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents learned of her Black ancestry, she could no longer stay the country. Her UK document offered no defense, the UK representative recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She went back to the UK, deeply ashamed as the scale of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a difficult one,” she expressed. Compounding her embarrassment was the release in 1955 of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

While I reflected with these memories, I perceived a familiar story. The story of identifying as British until it’s challenged – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the English during the World War II and survived only to be not given their earned rewards. Along with the Windrush era,