In July 1913, friends of the African British composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge-Taylor gathered in his hometown of Croydon, England, to lay a plaque on his grave in anticipation of the first anniversary of his death. The inscription reads, in part: "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 at the age of 37 sparked a string of tributes. The Boston Daily Globe reported that an event in London drew 5,000 attendees, and another in Boston saw performances by Maud Powell and members of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, as well as Harry T. Burleigh, Roland Hayes and other leading African American classical musicians.
Aug. 15 marks the 150th anniversary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's birth — and if the impact of his passing shook musical cultures on both sides of the Atlantic, the arrival of this milestone year has been much more asymmetrical. In the U.K., the BBC has programmed two performances of Coleridge-Taylor's music on this year's Promenade Concerts series: Two short choral works appeared on an Aug. 5 concert entitled "Great British Classics," and Sir Simon Rattle will conduct the Chineke! Orchestra in a performance of Bamboula (1911) on Sept. 5. In November, the London Mozart Players will highlight the composer with a special "Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at 150" program. In contrast, many major American orchestras — including the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra, Chicago Symphony, Detroit Symphony, Boston Symphony and Seattle Symphony — have neglected Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's music in 2025, a sign that the project of solidifying his legacy remains unfinished.
Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875 to a doctor from Sierra Leone and his British wife. As a rising composer, he gained prominence in his early 20s with two major successes: the orchestral work Ballade in A minor and the secular cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, both in 1898. The latter was the first in a set of compositions that would become his most enduring — a trilogy of choral works, plus an orchestral overture, that Coleridge-Taylor composed using the text 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 at 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 pieces garnered so much worldwide acclaim that Coleridge-Taylor was invited to tour the United States on three occasions — and there, his identity placed him into a much more complicated social context than he'd experienced in Britain. As a 1904 piece in The New York Times describing the composer's first appearance in the U.S. observed, "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 across the country celebrated Coleridge-Taylor as a transnational embodiment of Black intellectual and artistic 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 founded on the South Side of Chicago the year after his death. Coleridge-Taylor was also deeply interested in African American musical themes, and his body of solo instrumental and chamber works to this end became prized by Black American classical musicians.
"I first learned about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor through the Sphinx Competition," Grammy-nominated violinist and composer Curtis Stewart said in an email. "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 released an album on AVIE Records titled Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Toussaint L'Ouverture ᐧ Ballade Op. 4 ᐧ Suites from "24 Negro Melodies", which was specially planned to celebrate the composer's 150th birthday. The recording features Stewart's "recompositions" of "Deep River" and two other selections from the work that originally 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 different Ballade from the work that helped break Coleridge-Taylor's career open in 1898 — as "always richly lyrical, and lays well on the instrument for a singing approach."
The album also required the team to create new performance editions for each Coleridge-Taylor work, despite having rented materials for Toussaint L'Ouverture. "The parts for Toussaint were riddled with errors and essentially unusable in their delivered conditions," Michael Repper explains. After consulting recent scholarship and the manuscripts for each orchestra piece, Repper was able to publish new, free editions of all the included works, which are now available 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 approach of Stewart and Repper's new album — its mixture of recording, archival research and publishing — underscores the easily overlooked work required to make Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's music, and that of his peers, available to future audiences and performers.
Of course, Coleridge-Taylor was never wholly forgotten by classical music institutions or audiences. His success during his short career helped his reputation endure, as did his connection to the communities who memorialized him. But he also enjoyed a potent 20th century advocate in his daughter, Avril Coleridge-Taylor, who was born in 1903 and lived to be 95. Avril and Samuel had a strong connection, even though she was only 9 when he died. "Avril doted on her father," says British writer 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 own career as a composer and conductor grew in Britain, Avril used all the resources she could access to keep her father's memory 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 release a new album of Avril Coleridge-Taylor's orchestral music, including the world premiere recording of her 1938 Piano Concerto in F minor, the third movement of which is dedicated 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 challenging racial dynamics when she sought new opportunities abroad 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 also continued to advocate for her father while 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 government eventually targeted Avril on account of her race, forcing a return to England after only 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 help illustrate the obstacles that have challenged Black composers in the 20th and 21st centuries, societal limits that the father and daughter likely felt they could transcend through their relationship with music. The "happy courage in an alien world" that the two shared led each to become stranded between cultures in their own way. More than anything, this year's new recordings are reminders of the complexity of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's legacy, and the work still required to keep his memory 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."
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