No matter how famous a composer is in their lifetime, their fate is decided after they die. Will their style fall quickly out of fashion? Was enough of their music published to make it possible to perform? Are the stories told about them compelling enough to keep them in concert halls?
The lucky ones are mythologised and venerated. This is how gods are born: Beethoven, Haydn, Mozart, Bach (even if he had to wait 80-odd years for his deification). When the stars do not align quite so perfectly, however, the composer’s music vanishes with them. Their work fades into obscurity, known only to the most dedicated music aficionados, often remaining unplayed and unheard in archives.
Such was the afterlife of Avril Coleridge-Taylor. Born in 1903, Avril was the daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the esteemed Victorian-era composer of English and Sierra Leonean descent. She composed works ranging from songs to orchestral pieces, and also had a modest career as both a conductor and singer.
Her style as a composer was lyrical, theatrical, accessible—precisely the kind of sound that was regarded with a certain contempt by the musical establishment when she died in 1998. Modernist composers such as Peter Maxwell Davies and Harrison Birtwistle were considered the future of British music, not Coleridge-Taylor. None of her major choral or orchestral works were published at the time of her death, and the first professional recording of her music was not made until 2022, when the Chineke! orchestra performed her Sussex Landscape.
Coleridge-Taylor’s music tells us about both her and 20th-century Britain. She responded directly to events that were important to her personally, leaving behind a sonic portrait of her world that allows us to hear history through her ears. When the Second World War hit, Coleridge-Taylor wrote the desolate and violent Sussex Landscape, encapsulating her fear that the countryside she loved would be destroyed by German bombs. Later, she would share her desire for peace in a mighty choral work, MacArthur of the Philippines, penned after hearing about Japan’s 1942 victory over the US in the Philippines. She tried to have both works broadcast by the BBC. Both were rejected, despite widespread calls in the British press for composers to step up and respond creatively to the horrors of war.
Coleridge-Taylor had an ongoing battle against sexist attitudes, both as a composer and a conductor. When she became the first woman to conduct on Hyde Park’s bandstand in 1938, the press expressed astonishment that a “conductress” should be allowed to occupy this famous podium. As a composer, she was continually dismissed with the standard platitudes about women’s capabilities as musicians: that she wasn’t intellectually capable of writing large-scale works; that she was too dainty; or, when she stood up for herself, that she was too difficult.
She became so frustrated with her continual rejection in the UK that she turned her attention abroad. As her father had found considerable success in the US, she had thought to follow him and booked a conducting tour for 1939. War prevented this, however, so she looked elsewhere. When the opportunity came in the early 1950s to promote her work in Johannesburg, she took it.
This would become the most controversial chapter in her professional life. How could she, a woman of African descent, have possibly thought to make a home in apartheid South Africa? How excluded she must have felt back home to see Johannesburg as the more viable option. She was also a dreamer, and incredibly naive about the world she was stepping into. Despite the setbacks, she had always been confident about her abilities as a composer. As far as she was concerned, she deserved to be there. Her music did the talking. Perhaps she believed it was enough to do away with the question of race all together.
How could she, a woman of African descent, have possibly thought to make a home in apartheid South Africa?
Coleridge-Taylor set out for South Africa full of optimism. On 2nd May 1952, she was one of 36 passengers who took to the skies on the world’s first commercial jet flight, to Johannesburg. She wanted to write a “jet-age melody” about her flight before they landed, so she began sketching a Comet Prelude for orchestra. She told the press, “I feel the Comet in terms of string music, mainly cellos and double basses—with its high whistle for the woodwind part of the orchestra.” Comet Prelude captured the soaring anticipation and dizzying excitement of it all.
At first, Coleridge-Taylor’s optimism seemed to be rewarded. She had conducting engagements lined up with major South African orchestras, and her own compositions were accepted for performance. The South African Broadcasting Corporation aired her Piano Concerto in F minor. She had dedicated the closing movement to her father and took to the podium as conductor, placing the orchestra under the command of a woman of colour. These were subversive moves.
But apartheid caught up with her. Once Coleridge-Taylor’s heritage was realised, she was blocked from employment. Her engagements were cancelled, and she was left stranded in South Africa unable to earn money. In desperation, she turned to the British High Commission, which advised her to leave South Africa immediately. The whole experience filled her with regret. It was a wake-up call, not only to the realities of South Africa’s apartheid system but also to the limited protections afforded to British people of colour.
She did, eventually, manage to return to the UK, where she dedicated more time to building connections with other musicians of colour. She set up a choir called the New World Singers exclusively for singers of colour. Among the arrangements she made for them were spirituals, numbers from musicals and popular classics, weaving them all together as part of her musical legacy.
It’s a tangled, unmistakably British history of belonging, exclusion, compromise and resilience—a history that is conveniently smoothed out when stories like Avril’s aren’t told. But Avril’s afterlife is only just beginning to take shape. This year is becoming an important one for her. At the BBC Proms, her music featured alongside that of Edward Elgar, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughan Williams and, indeed, her own father in a concert of “Great British Classics”. November also brings the first full disc dedicated to her orchestral works, recorded by the BBC Philharmonic and conducted by John Andrews.
With this era will come new advocates to speak against the usual detractors unwilling to welcome a woman of colour into the pantheon of great composers. But Avril deserves more than godlike worship. It is her humanity that makes her so important, the ways in which she doesn’t fit into a standard narrative about who a composer should be or what they should do.
When we embrace Avril Coleridge-Taylor, we expand what classical music is capable of being. She truly is a composer for our times, her work having so much to say in a politically fraught world that is marked by prejudice. When she wrote her memoirs, she advised other composers to never give up, to always be true to their voice, even if it meant waiting for recognition. Perhaps, now, her optimism will finally pay off—Avril’s moment of recognition has come.
