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This talented musician always bore the weight of her father’s legacy. As the offspring of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, one of the best-known English composers of the 1900s, her identity was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

The First Recording

In recent months, I sat with these memories as I made arrangements to make the inaugural album of her 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, soulful lyricism, and valiant rhythms, this piece will provide new listeners fascinating insight into how she – an artist in conflict originating from the early 1900s – imagined her world as a artist with mixed heritage.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to adapt, to perceive forms as they actually appear, to separate fact from misinterpretation, and I had been afraid to address her history for a while.

I earnestly desired her to be following in her father’s footsteps. To some extent, this was true. The idyllic English tones of parental inspiration can be detected in several pieces, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). But you only have to look at the titles of her family’s music to realize how he identified as not only a flag bearer of English Romanticism and also a voice of the Black diaspora.

At this point parent and child appeared to part ways.

American society evaluated Samuel by the mastery of his music instead of the his racial background.

Samuel’s African Roots

As a student at the Royal College of Music, the composer – the offspring of a parent from Sierra Leone and a white English mother – started to lean into his background. Once the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar came to London in that era, the young musician eagerly sought him out. He set the poet’s African Romances as a composition and the next year used the poet’s words for a stage piece, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on the poet Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an global success, especially with the Black community who felt shared pride as the majority evaluated the composer by the excellence of his compositions rather than the his race.

Principles and Actions

Recognition failed to diminish his activism. In 1900, he was present at the pioneering African conference in London where he encountered the Black American thinker WEB Du Bois and witnessed a range of talks, covering the subjugation of the Black community there. He remained an advocate to his final days. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and the educator Washington, gave addresses on ending discrimination, and even talked about issues of racism with the American leader while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. Regarding his compositions, Du Bois recalled, “he wrote his name so prominently as a creative artist that it will endure.” He succumbed in 1912, aged 37. Yet how might Samuel have made of his child’s choice to be in South Africa in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to S African Bias,” declared a title in the African American magazine Jet magazine. This policy “struck me as the appropriate course”, Avril told Jet. When pushed to clarify, she revised her statement: she did not support with the system “as a concept” and it “ought to be permitted to run its course, overseen by well-meaning South Africans of every background”. If Avril had been more aligned to her father’s politics, or raised in the US under segregation, she may have reconsidered about the policy. Yet her life had shielded her.

Background and Inexperience

“I have a English document,” she remarked, “and the authorities never asked me about my race.” So, with her “fair” appearance (according to the magazine), she floated within European circles, lifted by their acclaim for her renowned family member. She presented about her parent’s compositions at the University of Cape Town and conducted the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in that location, featuring the inspiring part of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” Even though a skilled pianist personally, she avoided playing as the lead performer in her concerto. Instead, she always led as the conductor; and so the apartheid orchestra followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “may foster a transformation”. But by 1954, the situation collapsed. When government agents became aware of her Black ancestry, she was forced to leave the land. Her citizenship failed to safeguard her, the diplomatic official urged her to go or be jailed. She went back to the UK, feeling great shame as the extent of her naivety was realized. “The lesson was a hard one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her unceremonious exit from that nation.

A Recurring Theme

As I sat with these memories, I felt a familiar story. The account of being British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind Black soldiers who fought on behalf of the English during the global conflict and lived only to be refused rightful benefits. Including those from Windrush,