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This talented musician always bore the weight of her family reputation. Being the child of the celebrated composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, among the best-known UK musicians of the 1900s, her name was cloaked in the lingering obscurity of bygone eras.

The First Recording

Not long ago, I reflected on these memories as I prepared to record the inaugural album of Avril’s 1936 piano concerto. Featuring emotional harmonies, expressive melodies, and bold rhythms, her composition will grant audiences valuable perspective into how she – a wartime composer originating from the early 1900s – imagined her world as a woman of colour.

Past and Present

But here’s the thing about the past. It can take a while to acclimate, to see shapes as they really are, to tell reality from misrepresentation, and I was reluctant to face Avril’s past for some time.

I earnestly desired 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 heard in many of her works, such as From the Hills (1934) and Sussex Landscape (1940). Yet it suffices to review the names of her father’s compositions to see how he identified as both a champion of British Romantic style and also a representative of the African diaspora.

It was here that Samuel and Avril seemed to diverge.

White America judged Samuel by the brilliance of his compositions rather than the colour of his skin.

Parental Heritage

As a student at the prestigious music college, her father – the son of a parent from Sierra Leone and a British mother – started to lean into his background. At the time the African American poet the renowned Dunbar came to London in 1897, the aspiring artist was keen to meet him. He composed this literary work as a composition and the next year used the poet’s words for an opera, Dream Lovers. Subsequently arrived the choral work that put Samuel on the map: Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast.

Drawing from this American writer’s The Song of Hiawatha, the piece was an international hit, particularly among the Black community who felt shared pride as American society evaluated the composer by the quality of his compositions as opposed to the colour of his skin.

Activism and Politics

Success failed to diminish Samuel’s politics. During that period, he attended the First Pan African Conference in London where he made the acquaintance of the African American intellectual this influential figure and observed a variety of discussions, covering the oppression of the Black community there. He was an activist to his final days. He maintained ties with early civil rights leaders such as the scholar and Booker T Washington, spoke publicly on ending discrimination, and even engaged in dialogue on matters of race with the American leader while visiting to the US capital in the early 1900s. In terms of his art, reminisced Du Bois, “he wrote his name so high as a composer that it cannot soon be forgotten.” He died in 1912, at 37 years old. Yet how might her father have made of his child’s choice to be in the African nation in the that decade?

Conflict and Policy

“Daughter of Famous Composer gives OK to South African policy,” appeared as a heading in the Black American publication Jet magazine. This policy “seems to me the correct approach”, the composer stated Jet. When asked to explain, she backtracked: she didn’t agree with this policy “fundamentally” and it “ought to be permitted to resolve itself, guided by well-meaning people of diverse ethnicities”. Had Avril been more aligned to her family’s principles, or born in segregated America, she could have hesitated about apartheid. Yet her life had protected her.

Identity and Naivety

“I possess a British passport,” she remarked, “and the government agents never asked me about my background.” Thus, with her “fair” complexion (as Jet put it), she moved alongside white society, lifted by their praise for her late father. She delivered a lecture about her parent’s compositions at the educational institution and conducted the national orchestra in the city, programming the heroic third movement of her Piano Concerto, named: “Dedicated to my Father.” While a skilled pianist personally, she avoided playing as the featured artist in her work. On the contrary, she consistently conducted as the maestro; and so the segregated ensemble followed her lead.

Avril hoped, in her own words, she “may foster a change”. However, by that year, things fell apart. After authorities became aware of her mixed background, she could no longer stay the land. Her citizenship offered no defense, the diplomatic official urged her to go or face arrest. She returned to England, deeply ashamed as the scale of her naivety became clear. “The realization was a hard one,” she lamented. Compounding her disgrace was the printing that year of her ill-fated Jet interview, a year after her sudden departure from the country.

A Common Narrative

As I sat with these legacies, I felt a recurring theme. The narrative of being British until it’s revoked – that brings to mind African-descended soldiers who fought on behalf of the UK during the global conflict and made it through but were not given their earned rewards. And the Windrush generation,