Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Black classical music icon, at 150 : NPR

In July 1913, mates 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 loss of life. The inscription reads, partly: “Too young to die — his great simplicity, his happy courage 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 Daily 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 one hundred and fiftieth anniversary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s beginning — and if the affect of his passing shook musical cultures on each side of the Atlantic, the arrival of this milestone yr has been far more asymmetrical. In the U.Ok., the BBC has programmed two performances of Coleridge-Taylor’s music on this yr’s Promenade Concerts collection: Two brief choral works appeared on an Aug. 5 live performance entitled “Great 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 Players 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 venture of solidifying his legacy stays unfinished.

Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 to a physician 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 Wedding Feast, each in 1898. The latter was the primary in a set of compositions that might develop into 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 Song of Hiawatha. “[His] staying power in Britain into the mid-20th century was with Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and the other cantatas in that series,” says Sam Reenan, a music theorist who teaches on the University of Cincinnati. “After the first world war, there is a decades-long series of new stagings that are enormous spectacles. Then, after World War II, there are new stagings associated with the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II.”

These items garnered a lot worldwide acclaim that Coleridge-Taylor was invited to tour the United States on three events — and there, his id positioned him into a way more difficult social context than he’d skilled in Britain. As a 1904 piece in The New York Times describing the composer’s first look within the U.S. noticed, “Here he was received only by negro society. The white people turned out to honor his genius, but did not invite him into their homes. In England he is welcome in any home.” 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 School was based on the South Side of Chicago the yr after his loss of life. Coleridge-Taylor was additionally deeply occupied with African American musical themes, and his physique of solo instrumental and chamber works to this finish turned prized by Black American classical musicians.

“I first discovered about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor by means of the Sphinx Competition,” Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart stated in an electronic mail. “His ‘Deep River’ from 24 Negro Melodies, arranged by the great virtuoso Maud Powell, was on the repertoire list.” On Aug. 1, Stewart, conductor Michael Repper and the National Philharmonic launched an album on AVIE Records 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 one hundred and fiftieth birthday. The recording options Stewart’s “recompositions” of “Deep River” and two different choices from the work that initially drew him to Coleridge-Taylor’s music. “The intent here was to find my contemporary spirit, sense of time, rhythm and harmony based on the original,” Stewart explains. He characterizes the violin writing in Ballade in D minor, Op. 4 — a distinct Ballade from the work that helped break Coleridge-Taylor’s profession open in 1898 — as “always richly lyrical, and lays well on the instrument for a singing approach.”

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 parts for Toussaint were riddled with errors and essentially unusable in their delivered conditions,” 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 out there on his website. “This is a project centered on access,” Repper affirms. “There need to be parts that are faithful to the manuscripts and free of the mistakes which pervade the previously available versions.” The holistic strategy of Stewart and Repper’s new album — its combination of recording, archival analysis and publishing — underscores the simply ignored work required to make Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music, and that of his friends, out there to future audiences and performers.

Of course, Coleridge-Taylor was by no means wholly forgotten by classical music establishments or audiences. His success throughout his brief profession helped his popularity endure, as did his connection to the communities who memorialized him. But 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 think she spent a lot of her life living up to his musical legacy. When she was a teenager, she even said in an interview, ‘I sometimes 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 assets she might entry to maintain her father’s reminiscence alive. “She set up an orchestra and choir in his name; she conducted his works a lot,” Broad says. “She really fought to keep his name in concert programs throughout the 20th 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 is a piece full of storytelling,” says pianist Samantha Ege, the recording’s featured soloist. “[The third movement] is really forceful and powerful. I think that it’s a brilliant tribute to her father, because it paints him and his legacy so heroically.”

Just like 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, “In the U.K., she had a hard time on the basis of her sex. When she took the opportunity to go to South Africa, she identified as British. As a woman of lighter complexion, and with her British heritage, she could pass into the dominant society even though she didn’t deny who she was at all.” Avril additionally continued to advocate for her father whereas in South Africa. “She said white South Africans loved her father’s music,” Ege says. “She actually conducted the piano concerto I recorded with a white apartheid orchestra.” Still, the South African authorities finally focused Avril on account of her race, forcing a return to England after just a few years. “She writes really movingly in an unpublished memoir about how much that experience destroyed her self-confidence,” Leah Broad says. “She sort of isolates herself quite 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 probably felt they may transcend by means of their relationship with music. The “happy courage in an alien world” that the 2 shared led every to develop into stranded between cultures in their very own means. More 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 decided who gets to be a timeless composer?” Samantha Ege observes. “It seems it’s been decided he is not a timeless composer, even though in many ways, he was ahead of his time with what he achieved and his vision for the world.”