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Avril Coleridge-Taylor (1903–98)

Avril Coleridge-Taylor was born into musical families on both her father’s and her mother’s sides and while still in her early teens she won a scholarship to Trinity College of Music where her tutors included Gordon Jacob and Henry Wood. She wrote large-scale and small-scale works for keyboard, voice and orchestra, many of which have pastoral, sorrowful or romantic themes. While she did promote her own compositions and musicianship, enjoying some success as a composer and conductor, a significant focus of her adulthood was to sustain her father’s memory (the loss of her father at the age of nine had affected her deeply), and she became an energetic advocate, conducting concerts of his music and, in 1979, writing a biography of his life. Throughout their lives her father’s celebrated work Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast was to link and influence, both personally and musically, the members of her nuclear family. Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s mixed heritage (her paternal great grandfather was a freed slave from America who travelled from Canada to Sierra Leone in the mid 1800s), was to affect her markedly in her middle years when she was asked to leave South Africa (during the apartheid regime) in 1952 whilst on a musical tour, but in 1957 the contrasting worlds of her heritage came together when she was invited to compose the Ceremonial march for Ghana’s independence (from Britain). Avril Coleridge-Taylor is recorded as having felt a ‘double-prejudice’ as a Black woman composer. Her later life was spent in East Sussex, where her descendants still live, and where she composed several pieces that reflected her love of the Sussex Downs such as Sussex landscape.

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