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Samuel Coleridge-Taylor  (1875-1912) Afro-British Composer, Conductor & Professor Collaborator of Paul Lawrence Dunbar
Table of Contents   1 Birth   2 Father   3 Youth   4 Education   5 Pan-Africanism   6 Ballade in A Minor   7 Hiawatha's Wedding Feast   8 Marriage   9 24 Negro Melodies  10 Conductor  11 Teaching  12 North America  13 1904 Tour  14 1906 Tour  15 1910 Tour  16 Death  17 Legacy  18 The Hiawatha Man  19 Romance in G Major  20 Chamber Music  21 Hiawatha CD  22 Four Novelletas  23 Artsong Collective  24 Live-A-Music  25 Magnolias  26 Violin Concerto in G Minor  27 Ballade in C Minor  28 Additional CDs  29 Sheet Music  30 Resources  31 Bibliography	African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 1 Danse Nègre From African Suite (6:14) Petite Suite de Concert (13:36) Chicago Sinfonietta Paul Freeman, Conductor Cedille 90000 055 (2000)

Audio Samples:  
1 Koch International Classics 3-7056-2 H1 (1992); Samuel Coleridge-
   Taylor: Clarinet Quintet/PetiteSuite/Ballade/Spirituals; Harold Wright,
   clarinet; Hawthorne String Quartet
    Clarinet Quintet in A   (World Premiere Recording)
2 Musicians Showcase 1091 (2003); Senku: Piano Music by Composers
   of African Descent; William H. Chapman Nyaho, Piano  Deep River
3  AFKA SK 543 (1998); Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Chamber Music; The
   Coleridge Ensemble; Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio Op. 59, No. 1
   Sometimes I feel like a motherless child  Sample Time 4:53
4 Cedille 90000 035 (1997); Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the
   18th and 19th Centuries; Rachel Barton, violin; Encore Chamber
   Orchestra; Daniel Hege, Conductor
   Romance in G Major for Violin and Orchestra
5 Cedille 90000 055 (2000) ; African Heritage Symphonic series, Vol. 1;
   Chicago Sinfonietta ; Paul Freeman, Conductor
    a Danse Nègre From African Suite
     b Petite Suite de Concert
6 Self-Released (2001); Magnolias; Gail Davis Barnes, piano
   Scenes From An Imaginary Ballet, Op. 74
7 EDI Records 9259 (2005); Ballade; Nokuthula Ngwenyama, violin; Mihae
   Lee, piano  Ballade in C Minor, Op. 73

1 Birth
The British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on August 15, 1875 in Croydon, a suburb of London, England.  His mother was an English woman named Alice Hare.  His father was Daniel Peter Taylor, a native of Sierra Leone.

2 Father
Daniel Taylor trained as a physician at King's College, London.  After graduating he found his race was a barrier to maintaining a medical practice in the United Kingdom.  As a result he returned to Africa permanently around the time of Samuel's birth.  Jeffrey Green has published an article in Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 10, No. 2, entitled "The Foremost Musician of His Race: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor of England, 1875-1912".  It says of Samuel:

He had no known links with Dr. Taylor, who moved from Sierra Leone and the bustling port of Freetown to the colonial backwater of the Gambia, where he died in 1904.

3 Youth
Young Samuel was raised by his English mother and stepfather, but his musical education was overseen by Col. Herbert A. Walters, who belonged to the church choir in which the boy sang.  Samuel also studied violin with a local musician as a child.

4 Education
When the time came for college, Walters obtained an admission interview for Samuel at the Royal College of Music.  That led to his enrollment as a violin student in 1890.  Two years later he switched to composition and was taught by Charles Villiers Stanford.  He had works performed in public while still a student at the college.  Coleridge-Taylor wrote his Symphony in A Minor  in 1896, we are told by Lewis Foreman in the liner notes of the world premiere recording, Classico 684 (2006).  Foreman notes that the composer produced four versions of the final movement, but none of them satisfied Stanford.  He also tells us:

When he was only sixteen Novello published his anthem In Thee, O Lord, another four following while he was still in his mid-teens.

Critic Jonathon Woolf of Music Web International observes of the Symphony in A Minor:

His characteristic gift for melodic beauty is always present.

5 Pan-Africanism
Very early on the composer began collaborating with the African American poet and author Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906).  Writing in Africana Encyclopedia, Roanne Edwards says of Coleridge-Taylor:

He was also a leading exponent of Pan-Africanism, which emphasized the importance of a shared African heritage as the touchstone of black cultural identity.

6 Ballade in A Minor
Coleridge-Taylor rose to prominence in 1898, the year he turned 23, on the strength of two works.  The first was his  Ballade in A Minor.  It was commissioned for the prestigious annual Three Choirs Festival at the suggestion of the British composer Edward Elgar (1857-1934).  The piece was a critical and popular success.

7 Hiawatha's Wedding Feast
Coleridge-Taylor's second major composition of 1898 was his musical Hiawatha's Wedding Feast,  for which he is best known.  The work is a setting of verses from  Song of Hiawatha  by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.  He conducted its premier to great acclaim.  The work was staged hundreds of times in the United Kingdom alone during the next 15 years.

8 Marriage
Coleridge-Taylor married Jessie Walmisley on Dec. 30, 1899.  She was a pianist and a classmate of his at the Royal College of Music, where they met.

9 24 Negro Melodies
The composer credited the Fisk Jubilee Singers and their European tours with introducing him to African American spirituals.  He also collected traditional songs of Africans and African Americans from other sources for the work which became his  24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59 (76:48). Pianist Frances Walker has recorded it on Orion 7806 2 (1995). The CD was later re-released as Orion 83105 (2006) by Marquis Classics Distribution.  Coleridge-Taylor wrote program notes for the composition which read, in part, as follows:

What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried todo for these Negro Melodies.  The plan adopted has been almost without exception that of the Tema con Variazioni [Theme with Variations].

A 2-CD version of the work has been recorded by pianist David Schaffer-Gottschalk.  The recording is 24 Negro Melodies, Troy930-31 (2007).

10 Conductor
Along with conducting performances of his own large body of music, Coleridge-Taylor frequently appeared as conductor for the works of others. He held a permanent conducting position with the Handel Society of London from 1904 until his death.

11 Teaching
Coleridge-Taylor took on more and more teaching positions throughout his career, beginning in 1895.  At the time of his death he was a Lecturer at Croydon Conservatoire, and Professor of Composition at Trinity College of Music, Crystal Palace School of Art and Music, and Guildhall School of Music.

12 North America
The publicity surrounding  Hiawatha's Wedding Feast  created a huge demand for tours both within the United Kingdom and abroad.  Among the most important for the composer's career were three tours of North America in 1904, 1906 and 1910.

13 1904 Tour
The first concert of the 1904 tour was in Washington, D.C.  The Coleridge-Taylor Society, an African American choir, appeared with the United States Marine Band, with the composer at the podium.  During his stay in the capital Coleridge-Taylor visited President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.

14 1906 Tour
Jeffrey Green describes the 1906 tour in his article:

In the 1906 tour the Briton presented the  Atonement,  the Quadroon Girl, and  Hiawatha;  he also toured with Burleigh. He appeared in Toronto, St. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Milwaukee, as well as the cities of Boston, Washington and Chicago, which had also been on his first tour schedule.

15 1910 Tour
Green writes of the 1910 tour:

In May and June 1910 he made his third and last visit to America.  Boston, Detroit, New York, and Connecticut were on his schedule.  He was the guest conductor at the Litchfield County Choral Union Festival at Norfolk, Connecticut.  Such was his fame that just two racist whites withdrew from what they perceived as the humiliation of working under a black.

16 Death
On September 1, 1912 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died of pneumonia complicated by exhaustion from overwork.  He was just 37 years old. Although he took on an excessive work load of composing, conducting and teaching, he still had difficulty supporting his family.  When he published a work of music he received only a small one-time payment from the publisher.  The circumstances of his death contributed greatly to the subsequent adoption of a system of royalties for composers in the U.K.

17 Legacy
Coleridge-Taylor left a large and varied body of music, both vocal and instrumental.  His daughter Avril and son Hiawatha later earned degrees from the Guildhall School of Music.  Both had careers in the U.K. as classical composers.  Avril was also a conductor and pianist.  Jeffrey Green writes of the legacy the composer left for musicians of African descent:

By including African, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean elements in his compositions in melody and in title, as well as by being visibly and proudly of African descent, the music and the achievements of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had made black concert musicians proud and able to walk tall, especially in America where the compositions of European masters dominated in concert hall programs.

18 The Hiawatha Man
A major recent biography is  The Hiawatha Man,  by Geoffrey Self.  It was published in 1995 by Scolar Press.  Biographies have also been written by the composer's wife Jessie and daughter Avril.

19 Romance in G Major
Violinist Rachel Barton and the Encore Chamber Orchestra, led by Daniel Hege, Conductor, have made a world premiere recording of Coleridge-Taylor's  Romance in G Major for Violin and Orchestra.  The CD is Cedille 90000 035 (1997).  Here is a brief sound sample:
https://www.cedillerecords.org/035.html 
Marc Clague, Professor of Music at the University of Michigan, writes in the liner notes:

While not remembered primarily for his violin playing, Coleridge-Taylor presented the premiere of his  Romance in G Major, Op. 39  in the year of its composition (1899) accompanied by his wife, Jessie, at the piano. Written in one continuous movement, the work eschews technical display in favor of lush harmonic and melodic beauty.

20 Chamber Music
The Coleridge Ensemble is a 10-member group based in Massachusetts and dedicated to performance of works by composers of African descent.  It has recorded chamber music of Coleridge-Taylor on AFKA SK 543 (1998). The first piece on the CD is  Fantasiestucke [Fantasy Pieces] for String Quartet, Op. 5  (20:55).  Next is  Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio, Op. 59, No. 1  (18:10).  The final work is  Nonet in F Minor, Op. 2  (26:40).   Another chamber music recording is: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Chamber Music, Centaur CRC 2691. The performers are Kelly Burke, clarinet, and John Fadial, violin.  The works are: Quintet in F-Sharp Minor, Op. 10; Four African Dances, Op. 58; and Nonet in F Minor, Op. 2.

21 Hiawatha CD
A vocal and orchestral performance of Hiawatha (119:15) is available on a 2-CD set,  Decca: The British Music Collection 473 431-2.  The singers include Bryn Terfel, Helen Field and Arthur Davies.  They are accompanied by the Welsh National Opera Chorus and the Welsh National Opera Orchestra, conducted by Kenneth Alwyn.  The set also includes Symphonic Variations on an African Air (20:15), performed by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Grant Llewellyn, Conductor.

22 Four Novelletas
In 1999 the Southwest German Chamber Orchesta, led by Vladislav Czarnecki, Conductor, released a recording on the EBS label entitled Novelleten der Romantik (Novelletas of Romanticism).  The works are by Coleridge-Taylor and by the Danish composer Niels Gade (1817-1890).  n the liner notes Dr. Hermann Richard Busch writes of Coleridge-Taylor:

His highly interesting oeuvre represents late romanticism.                           ... His "Four Novelletas" op. 52 (1903) continue the stylistic tradition of Gade and Dvorak and excel in a great variety of motifs.  Contemplation and impetus, wit and irony blend on a high level, already leading to impressionism, at times touching the borders of operetta and musical.  The string orchestra is extended by a tambourine and triangle.

23 Artsong Collective
The Artsong Collective and violinist Wilson Collins have produced a recording,  My Heart Is Like A Singing Bird: Music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor,  Musaeus MZCD 101 (2000).  The following is an excerpt from a review by Christopher Fifield on the Web site  www.MusicWeb.uk.net  :

The Artsong Collective (basically two voices and piano with the flexibility to add other musicians as required) have put together an imaginative disc of 21 highly enjoyable songs for soprano or tenor, with the inspired idea of adding the violin sonata in the middle to vary the diet.

24 Live-A-Music
Live-A-Music is a chamber music ensemble comprised of five members of the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra.  The group released a limited-edition CD in 2001.  The program consists of Coleridge-Taylor's Fantasiestucke for String Quartet, Op. 5,  and his  Quintet for Piano and Strings, Op. 1.

25 Magnolias
Pianist Gail Davis Barnes released a CD entitled Magnolias in 2002.  The program consists of works for piano by Coleridge-Taylor and by Robert Nathaniel Dett.  Coleridge-Taylor is represented by ten pieces.  Five pieces, Scenes From An Imaginary Ballet, Op. 74,  are from a larger work, Incidental Music to the Forest of Wild Thyme.  Four are from  24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59.  The last and longest title is  Moorish Dance, Op. 55 (9:25).

26 Violin Concerto in G Minor
Coleridge-Taylor's  Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 80  (31:25) was given its first recording by violinist Philippe Graffin and the Johannesburg Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Michael Hankinson.  Jessica Duchen writes in the liner notes of Avie AV0044 (2004):

The concerto - which has only been performed a handful of times and never recorded before the present account follows the traditional three-movement format.  The solemn and lyrical character of the sonata-form first movement seems to recall Dvorak at times, Grieg at others and, in the rich use of the brass section, Elgar, whom Coleridge-Taylor revered. Some of its melodic contours occasionally suggest the influence of Negro spiritual themes.

The Violin Concerto in G Minor, Op. 80  has since been released on Hyperion CDA67420 (2005) by violinist Anthony Marwood and the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Martyn Brabbins.  Another performance can be found on Lyrita SRCD.317 (2007), on which Lorraine McAslan, violin, is accompanied by the London Philharmonic Orchestra under the direction of Nicholas Braithwaite.

27 Ballade in C Minor
Ballade  is the title of a CD of works by Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy and Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, on EDI Records 9259 (2005).  The performers are violinist Nokuthula Ngwenyama, an American of Zimbabwean-Japanese heritage, and Mihae Lee, a pianist born in South Korea.  Coleridge-Taylor is represented on the disc by his  Ballade in C Minor for Violin and Piano, Op. 73  (13:36).  Arianne Levesque writes in the liner notes:

 

The drive amongst Grieg, Debussy and Coleridge-Taylor to create a musical language based on cultural affiliation can be attributed to a rise of nationalism around the turn of the 20th century.  The climate fostered a strong desire to reflect pride in their respective cultures through composition without irrevocably breaking away from the stalwartly established classical tradition within which they played a major role.

28 Additional CDs
Additional recordings of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor include:
Piano Quintet in G Minor (26:23); Ballade in C Minor (13:00); Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp Minor (29:56); The Nash Ensemble; Hyperion CDA67590 (2007)
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast; Petite Suite de Concert; Bamboula
(55:39);  Royal Philharmonic Orchestra; Malcolm Sargent, Conductor;
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; Kenneth Alwyn, Conductor; EMI
Classics for Pleasure 5870242 (2005)
Petite Suite de Concert (11:54); Ballade in D Minor (12:54); Spirituals (18:29); Clarinet Quintet in A (35:39); Harold Wright, Clarinet; Virginia Eskin, Piano; Michael Ludwig, Violin; Hawthorne String Quartet; Koch 3 7056 2H1 (1992)
Songs from Hiawatha; Bamboula; Bournemouth Symphony Chorus and
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra; Kenneth Alwyn, Conductor;
Eminence CDEMX2276 (1996)
Violin Sonata; African Dances; Hiawathan Sketches; Petite Suite de Concert; David Juritz, Violin; Michael Dussek, Piano; Dutton Laboratories (2003)

29 Sheet Music
Coleridge-Taylor's sheet music is published by Chester-Novello and is available at its Web site: www.chester-novello.com 

30 Resources

African Romances: The Life and Music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)  http://members.fortunecity.com/wbthomp/sct-fil1.htm  - Robert Clements builds three biographical essays around selected compositions and two close examinations of his life in relation to  Hiawatha and  Symphonic Variations on an African Air.

CambridgeChorus.org  http://cambridgechorus.org/docs/comps/SC-Taylor.html  - Illustrated biography includes his father's medical studies and practice, his musical abilities, and his pioneering work in civil rights, including a visit to President Theodore Roosevelt's White House during an American tour.

ClassicalArchives.com  www.classicalarchives.com/main-c.html#coleridgetaylor  - (MIDI) - Music files offered in MIDI format.

MusicWeb.uk.net  www.musicweb.uk.net/brian/zcoleridgetaylor.htm  - Essay by fellow English composer Havergal Brian, beginning with the promise shown by  Hiawatha's Wedding Feast.  Includes observations of racial progress in the early 1900s.

Wikipedia - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Coleridge-Taylor - Biography of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with numerous links to other entries in Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, which is written collaboratively by volunteers around the world.

31 Bibliography

24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59, Orion 7806 2 (1995); Program Notes by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Composer; and by Booker T. Washington, Tuskegee Institute, October 24, 1904.

African Heritage Symphonic Series, Vol. 1, Cedille 90000 055 (2000); Program Notes by Dominique-Rene de Lerma, Professor of Music, Lawrence University.

Everyman's Dictionary of Music; Compiled by Eric Blom; Revised by Jack Westrup, Professor of Music, Oxford University.  New York: New American Library,1971.

Harvard Biographical Dictionary of Music; Edited by Don Michael Randel. Cambridge, Massachusetts & London, England: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996.

Clements, Robert.  African Romances: The Life & Music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912).  Web essay posted at  Militant Eclecticism site in September, 1997 to commemorate 85th Anniversary of the composer's death in 1912.

Microsoft Encarta Africana Encyclopedia, CD-ROM and a Basic Civitas Book. Kwame Anthony Appiah and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Editors.

 

This page was last updated on April 15, 2008