It was a pleasure today to celebrate Black History Month with an ‘e-talk’ about Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (‘SCT’) to friends from the Castlehaven Community Association Ageactivity 60+ group, and the Camden Local Studies Centre and Holborn Library (all in London, UK).
Tony (my husband, Martin Anthony Burrage) and I decided we would take this opportunity to share some music by SCT, and share a little about how we have come to be involved for so long in his story and his musical and personal legacy.

This is a live (‘home-made’) recording of Tony playing Coleridge-Taylor’s Op.71 Three Fours piano piece, composed in 1909, just three years before his tragically early death in 1912, aged just 37.

As you may have noticed, it is written very much in the progressive style of the late Romantic composers, moving forward into the C20th.

But let’s return to where SCT began, born on 15 August 1875 at 15 Theobalds Road, Holborn, London, almost next door to the Camden Local Studies Centre and Library, where Tony and I, with our friend and colleague Richard Gordon-Smith, have given previous talks on SCT.

Early years
Samuel’s father was Dr Daniel Taylor, who studied and practised medicine in London before returning to Sierra Leone.  It is unlikely that he knew his then girlfriend, Alice Martin – or perhaps Holman? – was pregnant when he left.

Confusion remains about how Alice and her son became so much part of the Holman family, but soon after Samuel was born the house in Theobalds Road – then a very down-trodden part of London – was demolished and Alice and Samuel moved on to better things in Croydon with Benjamin Holman – probably a reasonably successful businessman and farrier – and his family.

In 1887 Alice married a railway worker, George Evans, and they had three further children. Happily for Samuel, both Benjamin Holman and George Evans encouraged the interest in music which Samuel inherited from both his mother’s side of the family, and from the Holmans.

And so in 1890, encouraged by his family and other local people such as Colonel Herbert Walters – Samuel’s boyhood sponsor, and later witness to his marriage – Samuel aged just 15 won a place at the Royal College of Music, then opened only a few years previously, and located just a short train ride away from his home in Croydon.

At first he studied violin, but his teacher, Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), encouraged him to become a composer.    There is a story that on one occasion Stanford told a student who was offensive about SCT that Samuel had ‘more music in his little finger’ than the other young man had ‘in his whole body’.

Becoming a professional musician
By 1893, when he was 18, Samuel and some friends had given a concert at the College of music he himself had composed.  This included his Opus 5 Fantasiestücke and his 1893 Opus 1 Piano Quintet.

The (live concert) recording of the Op.1 which you just heard was made by Live-A-Music / Ensemble Liverpool – Tony and colleagues from the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra (of which Tony was a member for some 48 years) – after he and I had discovered the Piano Quintet score hidden in the archives of the Royal College of Music, unseen for over a century.  Tony worked on this old, handwritten score for six months to make it into playable ‘parts’ for two violins, viola, cello and piano; the very first performance in living memory was in November 2001, in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra‘s Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool. (The CD pictured above is of the original 2001 performance, and the weblink is of the concert made a year or two later in a church in Worcester, at the time of the Three Choirs Festival.)

Soon after his very important RCM concert in 1895, Samuel began to move in bigger circles.  In 1896, to give one example, he met the African-American poet and novelist Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) and they began to collaborate on projects which we might now call ‘musical theatre’.

Hiawatha
Samuel’s career took off rapidly, helped by Hiawatha’s Wedding FeastOp.30, 1898, the soaring success of his work to the libretto of Henry Longfellow (1807-1882).  Here is a short excerpt, the melody of which you will almost certainly recognise : SCT Hiawatha theme

This dramatic, fully costumed operetta, reflecting aspects of the ambitions of African-American civil rights campaigners, became an annual event in London’s Royal Albert Hall and in other cities for many years –  My mother recalls performances of Hiawatha in Southampton in the 1930s.  I can remember in the mid-1960s actually singing in it as a sixth form (year 12/13) student at the annual Birmingham Schools Music Festival in that city’s Town Hall.

Sadly however, SCT made almost no money from this monumental success, as he had sold the rights to the music to his publisher for a few guineas.  That shocking situation was the one of the factors in the formation of the Performing Rights Society, to protect composers’ interests.

Growing reputation

Before long SCT had come to the notice of leading composers such as Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1834) and so other orchestral pieces were performed, eg at the Three Choirs Festival, one of the world’s oldest classical choral festivals, which began in 1715 and still rotates triennially between the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester.

One composition, first performed at the Three Choirs in 1898, was the Ballade in A Minor.  Here is a recording of this Ballade made much later by Tony’s orchestra, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, conducted by Grant Llewellyn.  You may like to watch (as well as listen to) the entire video, as it offers many photographs of SCT at various stages in his life.

Increasing ‘racial’ awareness
And around that time too Samuel became very involved in issues of ‘race’ and equality. He came quite often up to Liverpool, where he was friendly with Alfred Rodewald (1862-1903), a friend also of Elgar, Stamford and others, and he adjudicated music festivals there –  as well as sailing from Liverpool to New York.

Samuel also became close friends with John Archer (1863-1932), son of Liverpool and of West Indian heritage, one time medical student, prize-winning photographer, a founder of the Labour Party and, like Samuel, a Pan-Africanist; John later became the first black Mayor of Battersea and only the second black Mayor in Britain. Archer’s Liverpool beginnings are still embedded in the civics of that city.

Samuel discussed issues of ‘race’ and Pan-Africanism with friends such as the scholar and activist WEB DuBois (1868-1963) and the educator and US Presidential advisor Booker T Washington (1865-1915) , who had himself started life as a slave.   In his compositions, Samuel chose often to reference what he called ‘Negro’ melodies in his music, quite explicitly emulating what Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) did for Bohemian ones,  Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) for Roma music,  and Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) for the folk music of Norway.

And so in 1900, aged just 25, Samuel attended, and was one of the signatories along with John Archer and American friends to, the first-ever Pan-African Conference, in London.

He wanted everyone to be treated fairly and equally, and he sought to do that too in his own life.

Visits to the USA
In the USA SCT’s reputation was growing:  in 1901 a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society was formed by black singers in Washington DC.

But even though many of his friends in the USA, such as these singers and the baritone and composer Harry Burleigh (1866-1949) and the violinist and composer Clarence Cameron White (1880-1960), wanted him to go there, his first trip was not until 1904, followed by two others in 1906 and 1910.

Whilst in the States SCT was welcomed as a star.  In 1904 he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House, as well as conducting choirs and orchestras, both ‘white’ and of mixed ethnicity.

There are still schools named after SCT in the USA, and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra players dubbed him ‘the African Mahler’, not because he wrote in the style of Gustav Mahler (he didn’t), but because he was an excellent conductor.

Back home, SCT worked as a conductor and music festival judge in all parts of England, and composing continued to be the major focus of his life.  He wrote over 80 significant works, as a visit to the Dominique-René de Lerma catalogue demonstrates, composing music to reflect his impressions of many parts of the world, from Morocco to Japan to Mongolia, as well as supposedly ‘Africa’, albeit he was probably more influenced by black American traditions than by the traditional cultures of what had become the British Empire.

Personal life
On 30 December 1899 SCT married Jessie Walmisley (1869-1962), niece of the composer Thomas Walmisley.  Jessie, like her husband, was previously an RCM student. Her parents at first objected to this ‘mixed race’ marriage, but relented just in time to attend the wedding.

Despite this difficult start (and the gap in their ages, Jessie being six years Samuel’s senior) the marriage was a success, and within a year or two the couple had two children, Hiawatha (1900-1980) and Gwendolyn Avril (1903-1998).  Both became professional musicians.

Sadly however Samuel died of pneumonia- a condition now routinely treated by antibiotics – in 1912, just as he was learning German in order to visit there to study Brahms and Dvorak.

And so we reach the end of this brief presentation,

And Tony will play us one more lovely work for piano, written in 1911, just three years before Samuel’s untimely death and now only rarely heard :

[5]  PIANO  Scenes from an Imaginary Ballet, Op.74   1911

Discovering the Coleridge-Taylor legacy

Custody of SCT’s work and reputation remains with the family, with whom we have collaborated where possible in promoting his work.

Much however is still to be done, in terms of understanding fully the legacy which this remarkable musician has left us.   We know where some of his scores in the UK are held, and we suspect that there are also more to be found in the USA, especially in the homes and archives of those who supported him there.

Interest in SCT’s music has grown considerably since the days when he was known simply as ‘a composer’ of a few pieces of music.  No-one told me when I sang it half a century ago that Hiawatha was written by a person of colour.   I learnt that fact only in the 1980s, when Tony and I began to explore SCT’s music.

Tony was for nearly 50 years a member of the RLPO, and the troubled times for Liverpool of the 1980s, caused us to reflect carefully about any ways we might try to bring together at least a few of the people in the conflicted inner-city communities at that time.  There was a lot of ‘racial’ tension in Liverpool and we knew there were musicians of all ‘races’ and skin colours who wanted peace and collaboration between people.

That was when, having studied the Elgar Violin Concerto at the Royal Academy of Music (in London) Tony remembered that Elgar had supported a young musician of colour, by the name of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor….  And so our search for the music of this then almost forgotten composer began, back in the early 1990s.

Our first ‘find’ was an out-of-print copy of the Fantasiestücke Op.5, a string quartet in shape which the Live-A-Music / Liverpool Ensemble performed in an informal event not long afterwards. But the really thrilling discovery was the Op. 1 Piano Quintet, forgotten for so long, and so worth the effort made to bring it to real live modern days audiences.

And now, with the internet (see e.g. this link) and many more opportunities to share both history and performance, the legacy of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor is becoming ever more acknowledged and expanded.

We hope you have enjoyed our story and the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, as we come to the end of the 2020 Black History Month.