Avril Coleridge-Taylor

Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor was born in South Norwood, London, the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie Walmisley, who had met as students at the Royal College of Music. She had an older brother, Hiawatha.[1]

On 19 April 1924, Coleridge-Taylor married Harold Dashwood, in the Croydon parish church. She initially composed and conducted using her first name and maiden surname. After their divorce she dropped her first name, thereafter going as Avril Coleridge-Taylor professionally.[2] In the 1930s she was living at The Studio, 4A Hill Road in St John's Wood.[3]

Coleridge-Taylor was invited on a tour of South Africa in 1952, during the period of apartheid,[4] arriving on the inaugural flight of the Comet jet from Croydon to Johannesburg.[5] Originally she was supportive of, or neutral to the South African apartheid system; she was taken as White and was mostly White-European in ancestry.[6] When the South African government learned that her father was not White (being biracial, he would have been considered Coloured under its system), it denied her work as a conductor and composer.[7]

In 1939, she moved to Buxted in East Sussex, where she had views over the South Downs. Coleridge-Taylor died in Seaford on the Sussex coast in late 1998.[2] In 1998 a blue plaque was placed at the nursing home where she spent her last days, Stone's House, Crouch Lane, Seaford.[8]

Coleridge-Taylor wrote her first composition, "Goodbye Butterfly", at the age of 12. Later, she won a scholarship for composition and piano at Trinity College of Music in 1915, where she was taught orchestration and composition by Gordon Jacob and Alec Rowley, and conducting by Henry Wood, Ernest Read and Albert Coates.[1]

In 1933, she made her formal debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall. She was the first female conductor of H.M.S. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. In 1938, she was the first female conductor to conduct at the bandstand in London's Hyde Park.[9] She was the founder and conductor of both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and its accompanying musical society in 1941, intended to give employment to musicians during the depression. The orchestra at its peak consisted of more than 100 musicians made up of 70 professionals and 30 "specially selected" amateur string players, and a choir of 70 voices. She also founded the Malcolm Sargent Symphony Orchestra and the New World Singers.[10]

In 1956, Coleridge-Taylor arranged and conducted the spirituals performed in a BBC radio version of Marc Connelly's 1930 play The Green Pastures.[11] In 1957, she wrote her Ceremonial March for Ghana's independence day celebrations, also attended by Martin Luther King.[12][5]

In later life she wrote a biography of her composer father, The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (London: Dobson, 1979).[13] The book details her own life and memories of her father. She also published compositions under the pseudonym Peter Riley.[14]

Her compositions include large-scale orchestral works, as well as songs, keyboard, and chamber music.[15] Her first orchestral work, To April (1929), also marked her first appearance as a conductor when it was performed two years later. There followed the suite Spring Magic (1933), the 12-minute tone poem Sussex Landscape, Op. 27 (1936), a Piano Concerto in F minor (1938), From the Hills, In Memoriam R.A.F., and the Golden Wedding Ballet Suite. Wyndore (Windover) and The Elfin Artist, are both for choir and orchestra.[16][17] Historical Episode (1941), one of her largest works, is a symphonic impression of war-time events and experiences.[10]

There are signs of a revival in interest in her work in the 21st century. The manuscript of the Impromptu in A minor, Romance de pan, first performed in 1922, was rediscovered in the Royal College of Music Library collection and performed in Brighton in 2018.[5] Sussex Landscape was played in 2019 by the Chineke! Orchestra at a Queen Elizabeth Hall concert on 22 April 2019, with a repeat at the Royal Festival Hall in October 2020.[18][19] It has since been recorded.[20] Wyndore, composed in Alfriston in 1936 and inspired by an Aldous Huxley poem ("I have tuned my music to the trees"),[21] is a seven-minute song without words.[22] The first performance was organised by the Birkenhead Philharmonic Society on 16 February 1937, conducted by Coleridge-Taylor.[23][24] The Royal Philharmonic Concert Orchestra gave its first UK performance for 82 years on 7 March 2020 at Boxgrove Priory, West Sussex.[25]

• Cohen, Aaron, International Encyclopedia of Women Composers, New York: Hamish Books & Music, 1981.
• Hixon, Donald, Women in Music: An Encyclopedic Biobibliography, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1993.
• Sadie, Julie Ann, & Samuel, Rhian, The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, New York: Macmillan, 1995.
• Sadie, Stanley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, New York: Macmillan, 2001.

• Coleridge-Taylor, Avril (1979), The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. London: Dobson Books.
• Bourne, Stephen (2019), Black Poppies: Britain's Black Community and the Great War. Gloucester: The History Press.

• Performance of Sussex Landscape Op. 27, by the Chineke! Orchestra, October 2020.
• www.blackmahler.com for Coleridge-Taylor and the most recent book about him. His daughter Avril is also featured in the book: Elford, Charles, Black Mahler: The Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Story, London, England: Grosvenor House Publishing Ltd, 2008. ISBN 978-1-906210-78-6
• "Daughter of Famous Composer Gives OK to S. African Bias", Jet Magazine, 1 December 1955.
• Two songs (Can Sorrow Find Me? and Silver Stars) performed by Gabriella Di Laccio and Clelia Iruzun