Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, circa 1905.
UK Nationwide Archives
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UK Nationwide Archives
In July 1913, buddies of the African British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor gathered in his hometown of Croydon, England, to put a plaque on his grave in anticipation of the primary anniversary of his dying. The inscription reads, partly: “Too younger to die — his nice simplicity, his glad braveness in an alien world, made all that knew him love him.” The shock of Coleridge-Taylor’s succumbing to pneumonia in September 1912 on the age of 37 sparked a string of tributes. The Boston Day by day Globe reported that an occasion in London drew 5,000 attendees, and one other in Boston noticed performances by Maud Powell and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in addition to Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes and different main African American classical musicians.
Aug. 15 marks the a hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s start — and if the affect of his passing shook musical cultures on each side of the Atlantic, the arrival of this milestone yr has been rather more asymmetrical. Within the U.Ok., the BBC has programmed two performances of Coleridge-Taylor’s music on this yr’s Promenade Live shows collection: Two quick choral works appeared on an Aug. 5 live performance entitled “Nice British Classics,” and Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the Chineke! Orchestra in a efficiency of Bamboula (1911) on Sept. 5. In November, the London Mozart Gamers will spotlight the composer with a particular “Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 150” program. In distinction, many main American orchestras — together with the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Boston Symphony and Seattle Symphony — have uncared for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music in 2025, an indication that the challenge of solidifying his legacy stays unfinished.
Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 to a health care provider from Sierra Leone and his British spouse. As a rising composer, he gained prominence in his early 20s with two main successes: the orchestral work Ballade in A minor and the secular cantata Hiawatha’s Marriage ceremony Feast, each in 1898. The latter was the primary in a set of compositions that may grow to be his most enduring — a trilogy of choral works, plus an orchestral overture, that Coleridge-Taylor composed utilizing the textual content of American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s The Track of Hiawatha. “[His] endurance in Britain into the mid-Twentieth century was with Hiawatha’s Marriage ceremony Feast and the opposite cantatas in that collection,” says Sam Reenan, a music theorist who teaches on the College of Cincinnati. “After the primary world conflict, there’s a decades-long collection of recent stagings which can be monumental spectacles. Then, after World Struggle II, there are new stagings related to the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.”
These items garnered a lot worldwide acclaim that Coleridge-Taylor was invited to tour the US on three events — and there, his identification positioned him into a way more sophisticated social context than he’d skilled in Britain. As a 1904 piece in The New York Occasions describing the composer’s first look within the U.S. noticed, “Right here he was obtained solely by negro society. The white folks turned out to honor his genius, however didn’t invite him into their properties. In England he’s welcome in any residence.” Even so, African American communities throughout the nation celebrated Coleridge-Taylor as a transnational embodiment of Black mental and inventive excellence. His first American tour was organized by the Black-run Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society of Washington, D.C., and a Coleridge-Taylor Music Faculty was based on the South Facet of Chicago the yr after his dying. Coleridge-Taylor was additionally deeply concerned with African American musical themes, and his physique of solo instrumental and chamber works to this finish grew to become prized by Black American classical musicians.
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“I first realized about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by the Sphinx Competitors,” Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart mentioned in an e mail. “His ‘Deep River’ from 24 Negro Melodies, organized by the nice virtuoso Maud Powell, was on the repertoire listing.” On Aug. 1, Stewart, conductor Michael Repper and the Nationwide Philharmonic launched an album on AVIE Information titled Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Toussaint L’Ouverture ᐧ Ballade Op. 4 ᐧ Suites from “24 Negro Melodies”, which was specifically deliberate to have fun the composer’s a hundred and fiftieth birthday. The recording options Stewart’s “recompositions” of “Deep River” and two different alternatives from the work that initially drew him to Coleridge-Taylor’s music. “The intent right here was to search out my modern spirit, sense of time, rhythm and concord based mostly on the unique,” Stewart explains. He characterizes the violin writing in Ballade in D minor, Op. 4 — a special Ballade from the work that helped break Coleridge-Taylor’s profession open in 1898 — as “all the time richly lyrical, and lays properly on the instrument for a singing strategy.”
The album additionally required the workforce to create new efficiency editions for every Coleridge-Taylor work, regardless of having rented supplies for Toussaint L’Ouverture. “The components for Toussaint have been riddled with errors and basically unusable of their delivered situations,” Michael Repper explains. After consulting latest scholarship and the manuscripts for every orchestra piece, Repper was in a position to publish new, free editions of all of the included works, which at the moment are accessible on his web site. “This can be a challenge centered on entry,” Repper affirms. “There must be components which can be devoted to the manuscripts and freed from the errors which pervade the beforehand accessible variations.” The holistic strategy of Stewart and Repper’s new album — its combination of recording, archival analysis and publishing — underscores the simply neglected work required to make Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music, and that of his friends, accessible to future audiences and performers.
Violinist Curtis Stewart, conductor Michael Repper and the Nationwide Philharmonic rehearse Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Ballade in D minor on the Schlesinger Live performance Corridor and Arts Middle in Alexandria, Va.
Elman Studio
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Elman Studio
After all, Coleridge-Taylor was by no means wholly forgotten by classical music establishments or audiences. His success throughout his quick profession helped his fame endure, as did his connection to the communities who memorialized him. However he additionally loved a potent Twentieth century advocate in his daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, who was born in 1903 and lived to be 95. Avril and Samuel had a robust connection, despite the fact that she was solely 9 when he died. “Avril doted on her father,” says British author and broadcaster Leah Broad. “I feel she spent loads of her life residing as much as his musical legacy. When she was a teen, she even mentioned in an interview, ‘I typically write down the music my father sends to me.’ ” As her personal profession as a composer and conductor grew in Britain, Avril used all of the sources she may entry to maintain her father’s reminiscence alive. “She arrange an orchestra and choir in his identify; she carried out his works loads,” Broad says. “She actually fought to maintain his identify in live performance applications all through the Twentieth century.”
On Nov. 21, the classical label Resonus will launch a brand new album of Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral music, together with the world premiere recording of her 1938 Piano Concerto in F minor, the third motion of which is devoted to her father. “It’s a piece filled with storytelling,” says pianist Samantha Ege, the recording’s featured soloist. “[The third movement] is absolutely forceful and highly effective. I feel that it is a good tribute to her father, as a result of it paints him and his legacy so heroically.”
Pianist Samantha Ege rehearses Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s Piano Concerto in F minor with the BBC Philharmonic.
Jason Dodd
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Jason Dodd
Identical to her father, Avril encountered new and difficult racial dynamics when she sought new alternatives overseas and, fatefully, moved to South Africa in 1952. As Ege explains, “Within the U.Ok., she had a tough time on the idea of her intercourse. When she took the chance to go to South Africa, she recognized as British. As a girl of lighter complexion, and along with her British heritage, she may go into the dominant society despite the fact that she did not deny who she was in any respect.” Avril additionally continued to advocate for her father whereas in South Africa. “She mentioned white South Africans liked her father’s music,” Ege says. “She really carried out the piano concerto I recorded with a white apartheid orchestra.” Nonetheless, the South African authorities ultimately focused Avril on account of her race, forcing a return to England after only some years. “She writes actually movingly in an unpublished memoir about how a lot that have destroyed her self-confidence,” Leah Broad says. “She form of isolates herself fairly a bit from the world.”
The entwined experiences of Avril and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor assist illustrate the obstacles which have challenged Black composers within the Twentieth and twenty first centuries, societal limits that the daddy and daughter seemingly felt they might transcend by their relationship with music. The “glad braveness in an alien world” that the 2 shared led every to grow to be stranded between cultures in their very own manner. Greater than something, this yr’s new recordings are reminders of the complexity of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s legacy, and the work nonetheless required to maintain his reminiscence alive. “How is it determined who will get to be a timeless composer?” Samantha Ege observes. “It appears it has been determined he isn’t a timeless composer, despite the fact that in some ways, he was forward of his time with what he achieved and his imaginative and prescient for the world.”
