A captivating smile graced violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason’s face as he navigated the energetic, folk-inspired rhythms of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor. A beautiful, heartfelt melody swelled, captivating the audience.
During a recent Sunday evening performance in South London, backed by a 38-member orchestra, Kanneh-Mason swayed with the music, expertly handling the concerto’s dynamic shifts and bringing it to a profoundly moving close that resonated with the opening themes.
“It stands out among British violin concertos,” Kanneh-Mason observed in an interview, highlighting its unique character. This distinctiveness equally reflects its composer, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, born a century and a half ago, whose enduring legacy the Fairfield Halls concert by the London Mozart Players sought to honor and rekindle.
Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, conductor, and master violinist, achieved immense respect in his brief lifetime by seamlessly weaving European Romantic aesthetics with the rich musical traditions of his West African roots.
His magnum opus, ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ – a trilogy of cantatas composed between 1898 and 1900 – garnered widespread acclaim across the United States. This monumental work inspired the founding of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society in 1901, an groundbreaking assembly of Black musicians in Washington.
Coleridge-Taylor visited the United States multiple times. In 1904, he was invited by the choral society to conduct ‘Hiawatha,’ performed with the prestigious United States Marine Band. During this historic tour, he even met with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
This invitation underscores the profound respect Coleridge-Taylor commanded. Musicologist Lionel Harrison, who has studied the composer since the 1970s, notes that ‘Hiawatha,’ based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, was among the era’s most beloved choral works, second only to Handel’s ‘Messiah’ and Mendelssohn’s ‘Elijah’.
However, unlike the enduring prominence of those canonical works and their creators, Coleridge-Taylor’s brilliance gradually faded from the mainstream.
“This is a recurring narrative,” Kanneh-Mason remarked, pointing to the prevalent biases within classical music, where the vast majority of celebrated composers are white.
Born in London in 1875, Coleridge-Taylor had an English mother and a father who was a doctor from Sierra Leone, who returned home before his son’s birth. His mother, who named him after the English Romantic poet, nurtured his musical gifts from the moment he received his first violin at age five.
At the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor honed his craft under Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford. His immersion in the conservatory’s orchestras and chamber groups forged him into a virtuoso violinist. Kanneh-Mason noted that the concerto’s writing clearly revealed a composer intimately familiar with the violin’s capabilities, a trait not always shared by even renowned composers like Brahms.
Despite a diligent career as a performer and teacher, Coleridge-Taylor faced financial hardship. In an era predating artist royalties, he sold ‘Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast’ – the initial segment of ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ – to a publisher for a mere 15 guineas (roughly a couple of thousand dollars today), forfeiting any future earnings from hundreds of thousands of subsequent sales.
He passed away from pneumonia at just 37, leaving behind an astonishing volume of compositions. Yet, by the close of the 20th century, Coleridge-Taylor’s works were rarely performed. Grammy-winning conductor Michael Repper noted that this neglect meant very little of his music was available in a playable, published form.
Motivated by this oversight, Repper, who regards Coleridge-Taylor as “one of the greats,” released an album in August featuring three newly discovered works. These pieces, recorded for the first time by the American National Philharmonic and violinist Curtis Stewart, mark a significant milestone.
Repper described the album’s creation as an “excavation project,” a monumental year-and-a-half-long research endeavor. He and his team meticulously reviewed Coleridge-Taylor’s original manuscripts, painstakingly retrieved from the Library of Congress and the British Library.
“Fortunately, Coleridge-Taylor’s handwriting was remarkably clear,” Repper chuckled, noting the project would have been far more challenging had the composer been as unkempt as Beethoven.
While Repper had previously conducted Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral works live, he emphasized that “a recording is eternal.” To broaden access to this music, he also published free scores of the album’s pieces. He proudly mentioned that two California orchestras had already downloaded the sheet music for their upcoming performances.
Among the rediscovered manuscripts were five movements from Coleridge-Taylor’s “24 Negro Melodies,” which Repper lauded as “a perfect example of his compositional genius.”
These 1905 ‘Melodies’ feature arrangements of African folk music and spirituals—songs of enslaved Black people from U.S. plantations. Coleridge-Taylor learned these powerful tunes through the renowned Nashville-based Fisk Jubilee Singers.
In his time, prominent Black American musicians such as Scott Joplin frequently struggled to present their symphonic compositions to audiences, often typecast solely as jazz artists. However, Britain’s established classical music scene provided a more welcoming environment for nurturing and celebrating a Black composer. Coleridge-Taylor, in turn, deeply felt a profound responsibility toward and connection with the tradition of spirituals.
Coleridge-Taylor articulated his ambition regarding these arrangements: “What Brahms has done for Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for Bohemian, and Grieg for Norwegian, I have endeavored to do for these Negro melodies.”
Tunde Jegede, a British Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and composer who performed at the London Mozart Players concert, explained the challenge for a Black composer in Western classical music: “You must balance your own cultural background with the foundational language of the form.”
This delicate balance was not a concern for Coleridge-Taylor’s white contemporaries and admirers, such as Edward Elgar and Arthur Sullivan.
Jegede, drawing from his own experience, emphasized that harmonizing diverse musical traditions is “no small feat,” particularly acknowledging how challenging it must have been a century ago. He concluded that Coleridge-Taylor was truly “ahead of his time.”
For the South London concert, Jegede presented a stirring composition titled “Song of Ourselves,” a piece directly inspired by Coleridge-Taylor’s profound connection to what Jegede terms “the African Atlantic experience.”
The stage came alive with the Croydon Seventh-day Adventist Gospel Choir positioned behind the orchestra, which was further enhanced by an African percussion band on its flanks. Jegede himself commanded the front, skillfully playing the kora, a traditional West African lute-harp.
As the choir’s voices rose with “We’re moving away from our sorrows,” the powerful orchestral harmonies blended with the consistent pulse of African drums and the bright, clear tones of the kora. In the packed auditorium, many in the audience were visibly moved to tears.
Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions radiate a similar depth of emotion. Repper, who considers Coleridge-Taylor an orchestrator on par with Ravel, praised his heartfelt approach, stating, “he’s writing from the heart.” Repper emphasized the importance of engaging with this music today, as “it reminds us how much passion, and emotion, and love can be in every note.”
Repper firmly believes that the composer merits a return to widespread recognition, asserting that this should be based purely on the “quality of his musicianship, the quality of his writing,” rather than his race or life story.