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This talented musician constantly felt the burden of her family heritage. As the offspring of the renowned Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known British artists of the turn of the 20th century, Avril’s name was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of history.

An Inaugural Recording

In recent months, I sat with these memories as I made arrangements to record the world premiere recording of the composer’s 1936 piano concerto. Boasting impassioned harmonies, heartfelt tunes, and confident beats, Avril’s work will grant new listeners deep understanding into how she – a wartime composer born in 1903 – conceived of her world as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about shadows. It requires time to acclimate, to see shapes as they really are, to distinguish truth from distortion, and I was reluctant to face Avril’s past for a period.

I had so wanted her to be a reflection of her father. Partially, that held. The rustic British sounds of her father’s impact can be detected in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). However, one need only look at the names of her parent’s works to see how he viewed himself as not just a champion of UK romantic tradition and also a voice of the African heritage.

It was here that parent and child began to differ.

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

Parental Heritage

As a student at the prestigious music college, the composer – the offspring of a African father and a Caucasian parent – started to lean into his background. At the time the poet of color Paul Laurence Dunbar arrived in England in 1897, the 21-year-old composer eagerly sought him out. He adapted Dunbar’s African Romances as a composition and the following year adapted his verses for a musical work, Dream Lovers. Then came the choral work that made him famous: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Song of Hiawatha, this composition was an worldwide sensation, especially with the Black community who felt indirect honor as white America assessed his work by the excellence of his art as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Principles and Actions

Success did not temper his activism. At the turn of the century, he attended the initial Pan African gathering in the UK where he encountered the Black American thinker this influential figure and witnessed a range of talks, covering the subjugation of African people in South Africa. He was an activist throughout his life. He maintained ties with pioneers of civil rights like the scholar and Booker T Washington, gave addresses on ending discrimination, and even talked about matters of race with the US President while visiting to the presidential residence in that year. As for his music, Du Bois recalled, “he established his reputation so high as a musician that it will endure.” He succumbed in that year, at 37 years old. But what would Samuel have made of his daughter’s decision to be in South Africa in the that decade?

Controversy and Apartheid

“Offspring of Renowned Musician expresses approval to S African Bias,” ran a headline in the community journal Jet magazine. Apartheid “appeared to me the right policy”, she informed Jet. When pushed to clarify, she qualified her remarks: she didn’t agree with apartheid “fundamentally” and it “could be left to resolve itself, overseen by well-meaning people of diverse ethnicities”. If Avril had been more in tune to her father’s politics, or from segregated America, she may have reconsidered about this system. However, existence had sheltered her.

Identity and Naivety

“I hold a English document,” she remarked, “and the officials failed to question me about my ethnicity.” Therefore, with her “porcelain-white” skin (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her late father. She gave a talk about her family’s work at the Cape Town university and led the South African Broadcasting Corporation Orchestra in Johannesburg, including the bold final section of her composition, subtitled: “In memory of my Father.” Although a skilled pianist on her own, she did not perform as the soloist in her work. Rather, she invariably directed as the maestro; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

She desired, in her own words, she “could introduce a shift”. However, by that year, things fell apart. Once officials discovered her Black ancestry, she had to depart the nation. Her British passport didn’t protect her, the UK representative recommended her departure or be jailed. She went back to the UK, embarrassed as the scale of her inexperience became clear. “The lesson was a difficult one,” she lamented. Adding to her humiliation was the 1955 publication of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her forced leaving from South Africa.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these legacies, I perceived a familiar story. The account of identifying as British until it’s revoked – one that calls to mind troops of color who served for the UK throughout the global conflict and lived only to be not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,