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Avril Coleridge-Taylor always bore the weight of her father’s heritage. Being the child of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a leading the prominent British musicians of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s name was enveloped in the long shadows of bygone eras.

An Inaugural Recording

Earlier this year, I sat with these legacies as I got ready to record the inaugural album of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. With its impassioned harmonies, expressive melodies, and confident beats, this piece will provide music lovers deep understanding into how she – an artist in conflict who entered the world in 1903 – envisioned her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about legacies. One needs patience to adjust, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to tell reality from misinterpretation, and I felt hesitant to confront Avril’s past for a period.

I earnestly desired her to be following in her father’s footsteps. Partially, this was true. The pastoral English palettes of parental inspiration can be heard in numerous compositions, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the headings of her family’s music to see how he identified as both a champion of British Romantic style as well as a voice of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril appeared to part ways.

American society judged Samuel by the brilliance of his music rather than the colour of his skin.

Samuel’s African Roots

While he was studying at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the son of a African father and a British mother – started to lean into his African roots. At the time the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in 1897, the young musician actively pursued him. He composed Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the next year adapted his verses for an opera, Dream Lovers. This was followed by the choral piece that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with African Americans who felt shared pride as American society judged Samuel by the excellence of his compositions instead of the his race.

Activism and Politics

Recognition did not temper his beliefs. At the turn of the century, he participated in the First Pan African Conference in London where he encountered the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and witnessed a variety of discussions, such as the subjugation of Black South Africans. He was a campaigner until the end. He sustained relationships with pioneers of civil rights including Du Bois and this leader, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even discussed matters of race with President Theodore Roosevelt while visiting to the presidential residence in 1904. As for his music, the scholar reflected, “he made his mark so high as a creative artist that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He passed away in the early 20th century, aged 37. Yet how might her father have reacted to his offspring’s move to travel to this country in the 1950s?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the Black American publication Jet magazine. Apartheid “struck me as the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. Upon further questioning, she qualified her remarks: she did not support with apartheid “in principle” and it “should be allowed to run its course, guided by good-intentioned residents of diverse ethnicities”. Were the composer more attuned to her father’s politics, or from Jim Crow America, she could have hesitated about the policy. However, existence had shielded her.

Identity and Naivety

“I have a British passport,” she said, “and the authorities did not inquire me about my ethnicity.” So, with her “porcelain-white” appearance (as Jet put it), she floated alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her deceased parent. She gave a talk about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, featuring the bold final section of her concerto, named: “In memory of my Father.” Even though a accomplished player herself, she did not perform as the lead performer in her piece. On the contrary, she always led as the leader; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

The composer aspired, according to her, she “could introduce a change”. Yet in the mid-1950s, circumstances deteriorated. When government agents discovered her African heritage, she was forced to leave the nation. Her UK document didn’t protect her, the UK representative recommended her departure or risk imprisonment. She came home, feeling great shame as the scale of her naivety was realized. “This experience was a painful one,” she expressed. Compounding her disgrace was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from that nation.

A Common Narrative

While I reflected with these memories, I sensed a familiar story. The story of being British until you’re not – one that calls to mind Black soldiers who fought on behalf of the British during the global conflict and survived only to be refused rightful benefits. And the Windrush generation,