The concert hall in South London was filled with the vibrant, folk-inspired rhythms of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor. As violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason performed the third movement, a subtle smile flickered across his face as a beautiful, lyrical melody suddenly re-emerged.
Backed by a 38-person orchestra on a recent Sunday evening, Kanneh-Mason swayed with the music, expertly navigating the score’s dynamic tempo shifts. He brought the piece to a deeply moving conclusion, echoing the soulful essence of its opening movement.
Kanneh-Mason described the concerto as “certainly unique” among British violin works. This uniqueness, he noted, extends to the composer himself, whose 150th birth anniversary the recent London Mozart Players concert at Fairfield Halls sought to both celebrate and revitalize.
[A Spotify embed of Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor, played by Braimah Kanneh-Mason and the London Mozart Players, was originally featured here.]
An iconic black-and-white portrait captures Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a composer celebrated for blending European Romanticism with his West African musical heritage.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Black British composer, conductor, and virtuoso violinist, achieved immense respect during his tragically short life. He masterfully wove together the grandeur of European Romanticism with the rich musical traditions of his West African ancestry.
A recent photograph shows violinist Braimah Kanneh-Mason, whose powerful performance of Coleridge-Taylor’s Violin Concerto in G minor in South London recently helped spotlight the composer’s work.
Between 1898 and 1900, Coleridge-Taylor composed his celebrated cantata trilogy, “The Song of Hiawatha,” which resonated deeply in the United States. This work notably led to the establishment of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society in Washington in 1901, a groundbreaking collective of Black musicians.
His influence extended to multiple trips to the United States. In 1904, the choral society invited him to conduct “Hiawatha” with the United States Marine Band. During this visit, Coleridge-Taylor even met with President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House.
[A Spotify embed featuring a segment from ‘The Song of Hiawatha’ was originally embedded here.]
Such prestigious invitations underscore Coleridge-Taylor’s esteemed status. Musicologist Lionel Harrison, who has dedicated decades to researching the composer, notes that “Hiawatha,” inspired by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem, was once among the most popular choral works of its era, surpassed only by Handel’s “Messiah” and Mendelssohn’s “Elijah.”
Yet, despite the enduring prominence of Handel and Mendelssohn within the Western classical tradition, Coleridge-Taylor’s brilliant star has, regrettably, faded over time.
Kanneh-Mason observes that this narrative of fading recognition is common, particularly in classical music, an art form where biases often lead to an overwhelming majority of white composers being performed.
Born in London in 1875, Coleridge-Taylor’s mother was English, while his father, a physician, hailed from Sierra Leone and returned there before his son’s birth. Named after the Romantic poet Samuel Taylor-Coleridge, the young Samuel was encouraged by his mother in music, receiving his first violin at age five.
A historical image depicts Coleridge-Taylor engrossed in a music score, a testament to the prolific output of a composer whose works, by the late 20th century, were largely overlooked in concert programming.
At the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor honed his skills under the guidance of Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford. His time in conservatory orchestras and chamber ensembles forged him into a virtuosic violinist. Kanneh-Mason remarks that the concerto’s intricate writing reveals it was clearly penned by a musician intimately familiar with the violin, unlike some other great composers such as Brahms.
Despite his tireless work as a performer and teacher, Coleridge-Taylor often faced financial hardship. In an era predating artists’ royalties, he sold the rights to “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast,” the initial section of “The Song of Hiawatha,” for a mere 15 guineas—a sum equivalent to only a few thousand dollars today. Consequently, he received no further compensation despite hundreds of thousands of copies being sold.
Coleridge-Taylor’s life was cut tragically short at 37 by pneumonia, but not before he produced a remarkable catalog of compositions. Yet, by the close of the 20th century, his music was rarely featured in programs. Grammy-winning conductor Michael Repper notes that a significant portion of Coleridge-Taylor’s work “actually exists today in a performable, published format” due to this oversight.
Driven by this frustration, Repper, who considers Coleridge-Taylor “one of the greats,” released an album in August featuring three previously undiscovered works by the composer. These pieces were recorded for the first time by the American ensemble National Philharmonic and violinist Curtis Stewart.
Repper characterized the album’s creation as an “excavation project,” involving an intensive year-and-a-half research effort. He and his team meticulously transcribed Coleridge-Taylor’s original manuscripts, discovered in the Library of Congress and the British Library, note by painstaking note.
Another close-up reveals Braimah Kanneh-Mason passionately playing his violin, underscoring his earlier remark about the “biases that people have, especially in classical music.”
Fortunately, Coleridge-Taylor’s remarkably clear penmanship eased the process. “That project could have been a lot harder had he been messy like Beethoven,” Repper quipped.
While Repper had previously conducted Coleridge-Taylor’s orchestral works live, he emphasized that “recording can serve an additional purpose, in that a recording is forever.” To boost accessibility, Repper has also made free scores of the album’s pieces publicly available, noting that two Californian orchestras have already downloaded the sheet music for future performances.
The research also uncovered five movements from Coleridge-Taylor’s “24 Negro Melodies,” which Repper hails as “a perfect example of the genius of his writing.”
[A Spotify embed of one of Coleridge-Taylor’s ’24 Negro Melodies’ was originally presented here.]
Composed in 1905, these “Melodies” feature brilliant arrangements of African folk music and spirituals—powerful songs sung by enslaved Black individuals on U.S. plantations. Coleridge-Taylor was introduced to these vital traditions by the acclaimed Fisk Jubilee Singers from Nashville.
While contemporary Black American musicians like Scott Joplin often struggled to present their symphonic works and transcend jazz genre labels, Britain’s established classical music scene offered a different path. Coleridge-Taylor embraced this, feeling a profound responsibility toward, and connection with, the spirituals’ rich tradition.
Coleridge-Taylor himself expressed his ambition: “What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro melodies.”
Pictured here is Tunde Jegede with his kora, the distinctive West African lute-harp he skillfully played during the South London concert.
Tunde Jegede, a British Nigerian multi-instrumentalist and composer who performed at the London Mozart Players concert, highlighted the intricate challenge of crafting authentic work as a Black composer within Western classical music: “You’re having to balance your own cultural background with the language of the form.”
This complex balance was a burden not shared by Coleridge-Taylor’s white contemporaries and admirers, such as Edward Elgar and Arthur Sullivan.
Jegede, drawing on his own experiences, emphasized that harmonizing diverse musical traditions is “no small feat,” noting its difficulty even today, let alone a century ago. He praised Coleridge-Taylor as “quite ahead of his time” for successfully achieving this.
For the South London concert, Jegede contributed a stirring composition titled “Song of Ourselves,” drawing inspiration from Coleridge-Taylor’s deep connection to “the African Atlantic experience.”
The performance was a vibrant fusion: singers from the Croydon Seventh-day Adventist Gospel Choir stood majestically behind the orchestra, which was further energized by an African percussion band. At the forefront, Jegede captivated the audience with his kora, the traditional West African lute-harp.
As the choir’s voices rose with “We’re moving away from our sorrows,” the soaring orchestral melodies blended seamlessly with the resonant beat of African drums and the bright, shimmering tones of the kora. The profound emotion of the performance visibly moved many in the packed auditorium to tears.
Coleridge-Taylor’s own compositions resonate with a similar intensity. Repper considers him an orchestrator as gifted as Ravel, noting that “he’s writing from the heart.” Repper emphasized the importance of engaging with Coleridge-Taylor’s music today, stating, “because it reminds us how much passion, and emotion, and love can be in every note.”
Ultimately, Repper firmly believes Coleridge-Taylor deserves to be a household name once more, not merely for his heritage or personal narrative, but because “the quality of his musicianship, the quality of his writing, merits it.”