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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the burden of her family legacy. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the most famous UK musicians of the early 20th century, her name was enveloped in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I reflected on these shadows as I made arrangements to record the first-ever recording of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting impassioned harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, her composition will provide new listeners fascinating insight into how the composer – an artist in conflict born in 1903 – conceived of her world as a female composer of color.

Legacy and Reality

However about shadows. It can take a while to adjust, to recognize outlines as they really are, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I felt hesitant to confront Avril’s past for some time.

I earnestly desired Avril to be a reflection of her father. In some ways, she was. The pastoral English palettes of Samuel’s influence can be heard in many of her works, including From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only review the names of her family’s music to understand how he heard himself as both a champion of British Romantic style but a representative of the African heritage.

This was where Samuel and Avril began to differ.

The United States evaluated Samuel by the excellence of his art rather than the his ethnicity.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the Royal College of Music, Samuel – the son of a African father and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. When the Black American writer Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He set the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the subsequent year incorporated his poetry for an opera, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that established his reputation: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Inspired by this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel’s Hiawatha was an worldwide sensation, particularly among Black Americans who felt shared pride as American society assessed his work by the excellence of his compositions as opposed to the his race.

Advocacy and Beliefs

Recognition did not temper Samuel’s politics. At the turn of the century, he attended the pioneering African conference in the UK where he made the acquaintance of the prominent scholar WEB Du Bois and observed a range of talks, covering the oppression of the Black community there. He was an activist until the end. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights such as this intellectual and the educator Washington, delivered his own speeches on racial equality, and even talked about matters of race with the American leader while visiting to the US capital in that year. In terms of his art, the scholar reflected, “he established his reputation so high as a composer that it will endure.” He died in the early 20th century, aged 37. Yet how might the composer have made of his daughter’s decision to travel to South Africa in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician shows support to apartheid system,” ran a headline in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “appeared to me the correct approach”, she informed Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she was not in favor with this policy “in principle” and it “could be left to work itself out, directed by benevolent South Africans of every background”. Had Avril been more attuned to her father’s politics, or raised in Jim Crow America, she might have thought twice about apartheid. However, existence had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I possess a British passport,” she remarked, “and the officials never asked me about my ethnicity.” Thus, with her “light” complexion (as Jet put it), she floated among the Europeans, buoyed up by their admiration for her deceased parent. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the educational institution and conducted the broadcasting ensemble in that location, programming the bold final section of her concerto, titled: “In remembrance of my Father.” Even though a confident pianist personally, she did not perform as the lead performer in her concerto. Instead, she invariably directed as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble played under her baton.

Avril hoped, as she stated, she “might bring a transformation”. However, by that year, the situation collapsed. After authorities became aware of her African heritage, she had to depart the country. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the British high commissioner urged her to go or risk imprisonment. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a difficult one,” she lamented. Adding to her disgrace was the printing that year of her unfortunate magazine feature, a year after her sudden departure from that nation.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these memories, I felt a recurring theme. The story of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind African-descended soldiers who defended the British throughout the World War II and made it through but were refused rightful benefits. Along with the Windrush era,