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'Samuel Coleridge-Taylor' (August 15, 1875–September 1, 1912) was a black, English composer who achieved such success he was called "The Black Mahler."

Contents

History

Legacy

Posthumous publishing and advocacy of his music

Further source material

External links

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(who conducted the first performance of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast,) 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 mixed race 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, helped by Sir Edward Elgar who recommended him to the Three Choirs Festival which premiered his ''Ballade in A Minor''. His early work was also praised by the influential music editor and critic August Jaeger of music publisher Novello, who told Elgar that Samuel was "a genius." (Jaeger was 'Nimrod' in Elgar's Enigma Variations.) 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 met the black American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and set some of his poems to music, and was also influenced by him to be aware of his African ancestry and the music of that continent.
Coleridge-Taylor was a shy man in general life but effective in communicating when conducting. He was very kind, especially to black people down on their luck, and gave away far too much money, bearing in mind that composers were not handsomely paid for their efforts and often sold the rights to works outright, thereby missing out on royalties which went to publishers instead. He was much sought after for lecturing and adjudicating at festivals.
He was only 37 when he died of overwork and pneumonia. His wife was left almost penniless but King George V granted her a pension of £100 a year, evidence of the composer's high standing in society. A memorial concert was held later in 1912 at the Royal Albert Hall.
Coeridge-Taylor's 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.

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 rivalled 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. The ''Petite Suite de Concert'' is still regularly played. Curiously, despite his being named after the poet Coleridge, he only attempted to set one of his poems to music, The Legend of Kubla Khan.
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. He visited the USA three times receiving great acclaim and earned the title "the Black Mahler."

Posthumous publishing and advocacy of his music

In 1999, 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 from 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 1990s 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.^[1]
The Nash Ensemble's recording of the Piano Quintet will be released in 2007.
In 2006, Mr. Meadows finished engraving the first edition of Coleridge-Taylor's Symphony in A minor. He has also finished transcribing from the RCM manuscript the "Haytian Dances", a work virtually identical to the "Noveletten", but with a fifth movement inserted by Coleridge-Taylor, based on the slow movement of the Symphony. This work is for string orchestra, tamborine, and triangle. The first performance in modern times is scheduled in Deya, Mallorca in August 2007, by the Kremlin Chamber Orchestra, directed by Misha Rachlevsky.
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. The concerto was also performed at Harvard University's Sanders Theatre in the fall of 1998 by John McLaughlin Williams and William Thomas as part of the above-mentioned 100th Anniversary celebration of the composition of Hiawatha's Wedding-Feast.

Further source material

★ Coleridge-Taylor is extensively mentioned in the biography of Sir Malcolm Sargent by Charles Reid, Hamish Hamilton, London 1968.

★ Biography: The Hiawatha Man, The Life & Work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Geoffrey Self, Scolar Press, 1995. ISBN 0-85967-983-7

★ Croydon Clock Tower Museum at the Town Hall has exhibits about this composer, some in the Horace Petherick (artist) collection

External links

1. http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/1998/10.15/ConcerttoFeatur.html


★ Website

★ Soundpost website

★ Festival website

★ Find-A-Grave profile for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

★ Review of recording of Coleridge-Taylor chamber music

★ Coleridge Taylor in the 1881 census

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★ Joseph Antonio Emidy another, earlier black composer, works now lost