Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in Holborn, London, on 15 August 1875, the illegitimate son of an English mother and a father, a doctor of Creole descent, who returned to his native Sierra Leone before his child was born. Raised in Croydon by his mother and her own father, the young Samuel was a chorister at St George’s Presbyterian Church, while learning the violin from his maternal grandfather. In 1890 it was his prowess as a violinist which secured him a place at the Royal College of Music, where he subsequently studied composition from 1892 with Sir Charles Villiers Stanford, and the following year he was awarded an open scholarship. Frequent public performances of his music followed, and a year after leaving the RCM in 1897 he received his first commission, the Ballade in A minor written for the Three Choirs Festival at the recommendation of Elgar, who described him as ‘far and away the cleverest fellow amongst the young men’.

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Although educated firmly in the European classical tradition, from the late 1890s Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly interested in the music associated with his natural father’s heritage. Having heard the Jubilee Singers of Fisk University, Nashville, performing in London, he began collecting African-American melodies for use in his compositions, and his output thereafter often displayed the influence of their folk idioms. These included an extensive use of offbeat rhythms, rich and colourful chromatic harmony, and textures frequently alternating between solo lines with accompaniment and more solid chordal passages. The composer made three visits to the United States, becoming a noted figure there. On his first visit, in 1904 to conduct the Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, founded in Washington DC in 1901 for black singers, he was received by President Theodore Roosevelt at the White House. He was also influenced by the writings of American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the sociologist and civil-rights activist W. E. B. Du Bois. 

Coleridge-Taylor’s early death aged 37, from pneumonia probably brought on by overwork, was a tragedy for British music. The founding of the Performing Right Society two years later, in 1914, was in part a reaction to this loss, helping composers to receive just reward for their labours. In his lifetime he was most famous for his trilogy of Hiawatha cantatas, which under the baton of Sir Malcolm Sargent maintained his reputation for choral music. But it was the advent from the 1990s onwards of new recordings of his orchestral and chamber works that revealed the full extent of his creative achievement. In addition to fine orchestral scores such as the Ballade in A minor, the Symphonic Variations on an African Air and the Violin Concerto, Coleridge-Taylor was a gifted composer of music crafted in a lighter yet no less serious vein. Many such works are represented in the Stainer & Bell catalogue, including songs, instrumental pieces and music for solo piano, and offering a rich variety of repertoire that is increasingly heard in the mainstream of today’s music-making.

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