Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (August 15, 1875–September 1, 1912) was an English composer.
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[edit] History
Coleridge Taylor was born in Holborn, London, to a Sierra Leonean Creole (Krio) father, Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, and an English mother, Alice Hare Martin. He was named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge; the hyphen in his surname was initially a typographical error, which he then adopted for his professional name.
His father was appointed coroner for the British Empire in the Gambia and returned to West Africa after his birth. He was brought up in Croydon by Martin and her adopted parents, who were called Holmans, and who were a highly musical family but corresponded regularly with his father who helped promote Samuel's reputation in Sierra-Leone where he is all but forgotten. He studied at the Royal College of Music under Stanford, and later taught and conducted the orchestra at the Croydon Conservatoire. He married Jessie Walmisley, a fellow student of his at the RCM, in 1899 despite her parents' objection to his half-black parentage. By her he had a son, Hiawatha (1900-1980) and a daughter, Avril, born Gwendolyn (1903-1998).
He soon earned a reputation as a composer, and his successes brought him a tour of America in 1904, which in turn increased his interest in his racial heritage. He attempted to do "for African music what Brahms did for Hungarian music and Dvořák for Bohemian music". He was only 37 when he died of overwork and pneumonia. His work was championed by Sir Malcolm Sargent who conducted 12 'seasons' of Hiawatha at the Royal Albert Hall between 1928 and 1940 with the Royal Choral Society.
[edit] Legacy
Coleridge-Taylor's greatest success was perhaps his cantata Hiawatha's Wedding-feast, which was widely performed by choral groups in England during Coleridge-Taylor's lifetime, with a popularity rivaled only by chorus standards Handel's Messiah and Mendelssohn's Elijah. He followed this with several other pieces about Hiawatha: The Death of Minnehaha, Overture to The Song of Hiawatha and Hiawatha's Departure. The Hiawatha seasons at the Royal Albert Hall were conducted by Sir Malcolm Sargent and were tremendously popular, involving thousands of choristers and scenery covering the organ loft. They ended when World War II broke out.
He also completed an array of chamber music, anthems, and African Dances for violin, among other works.
Coleridge-Taylor was greatly admired by African-Americans; in 1901, a 200-voice African-American chorus was founded in Washington, D.C. called the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society.
[edit] Posthumous publishing and advocacy of his music
In 1999[citation needed], freelance music editor Patrick Meadows discovered that three important chamber works by Coleridge-Taylor had apparently never been printed and made available to musicians. After receiving copies for the Royal College of Music in London, he made playing editions of the Nonet, Piano Quintet, and Piano Trio. The works were then performed in Meadows's regular chamber music festival on the island of Mallorca, and were well-received by the public as well as the performers. The first modern performances of these works were done in the early 1990's by the Boston, Massachusetts-based Coleridge Ensemble, led by William Thomas of Phillips Academy, Andover. This group subsequently made world premiere recordings of the Nonet, Fantasiestücke for String Quartet and Six Negro Folksongs for Piano Trio which were released in 1998 on the Afka Recordings label. Thomas, a champion of lost works by black composers, also revived Coleridge's Hiawatha's Wedding-feast in a performance commemorating the composition's 100th anniversary with the Cambridge Community Chorus at Harvard's Sanders Theatre in the spring of 1998.
Coleridge-Taylor also wrote a symphony that is yet unpublished, which Mr. Meadows hopes to tackle in the near future.
He composed a violin concerto, the American performance of which had to be postponed because the parts were sent on the RMS Titanic. It has been recorded by Philippe Graffin and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra and was performed as part of the 100th Anniversary celebration at Sanders Theatre in the Spring of 1998.
Coleridge-Taylor is extensively mentioned in the biography of Sir Malcolm Sargent by Charles Reid, Hamish Hamilton, London 1968.
