In the ongoing rediscovery of Black classical composers, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his music stand apart from other figures. Born in 1875 to an English mother and a father from Sierra Leone, Coleridge-Taylor was British and was not marginalized in his lifetime, as so many Black American composers were.
He received the best education that British conservatories could provide, was respected by his White contemporaries, and was popular both as a violinist and a composer in the late-romantic/Edwardian style of Charles Villiers Stanford (his teacher), Edward Elgar and Gustav Holst.
(He was not the first European of African descent to enjoy such stature. Joseph Bologne, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, was a comparably mainstream musical figure in 18th-century France.)
At the turn of the 20th century, Coleridge-Taylor produced one of the most popular vocal-orchestral works in the English-speaking world: “The Song of Hiawatha,” a triptych of cantatas based on the poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. In 1904, while touring the US with the work, the composer was invited to the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt. “Such an invitation reflects how respected Coleridge-Taylor was,” The New York Times’ Eleanor Stanford writes in an article timed to the 150th anniversary of the composer’s birth.
Hiawatha was not Coleridge-Taylor’s only American subject; he also arranged Black spirituals and songs. And many of his works also draw on West African themes.
Stanford, interviewing the Coleridge-Taylor scholar Lionel Harrison and musicians reviving Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions, offers a good introduction to a composer worth getting to know:
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