[Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912)]
Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor, the prominent Afro-British composer, conductor and professor of Music profiled at AfriClassical.com,
was born on August 15, 1875 in Holborn, London, England. His mother
was an Englishwoman and his father was an African physician who
returned to his home country of Sierra Leone when he found patients
in England would not come to him for treatment. Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor was a leading Pan-Africanist who collaborated
extensively with the African American poet Paul Laurence Dunbar.
Efforts
to promote awareness of the life and music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
have intensified in the past year because of the
Centennial of the composer's death, just 17 days from now, Sept. 1,
2012. AfriClassical.com and AfriClassical Blog have been
collaborating extensively with the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Foundation, http://www.sctf.org.uk/,
a nonprofit organization registered in the United Kingdom. The group's Executive
Chair is Hilary Burrage.
This
year Prof. Dominique-René de Lerma,
http://www.CasaMusicaledeLerma.com, has completed a comprehensive
Works list and Bibliography for Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He has made
it available to the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation and
AfriClassical.com, both of which have made the reference source
available online.
Residents
of Croydon, where the composer was raised, have launched a local
effort to honor the life and works of Coleridge-Taylor throughout the
Centennial Year of 2012. AfriClassical.com has been updated to
include findings on the early life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor from
Jeffrey Green's 2011 biography, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, a Musical
Life. The 256-page hardcover book is from Pickering and Chatto
Publishers. It has been highly praised in a review by Prof.
Dominique-René de Lerma, principal advisor to AfriClassical.com.
Sandrine
Thomas writes in BeyondVictoriana.com
on May 23, 2010 that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was one of 37 delegates
to the first Pan-Africanist Conference in London in 1900:
“Thirty-seven delegates attended the conference, among them Samuel
Coleridge Taylor, John Alcindor, Dadabhai Naoroji, John Archer and Du
Bois, and the focus of a great many speeches delivered were aimed at
the governments of world powers to introduce legislation to bring
about racial equality.”
Coleridge-Taylor
rose to prominence in 1898, the year he turned 23, on the strength of
two works. The first was Ballade in A Minor. Next came
Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, for which he is best known. It is a
setting of verses from Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow. He conducted its premier to great acclaim. The work was
staged hundreds of times in the United Kingdom and North America
during the next 15 years.
The
composer made three hugely successful tours of North America, in
1904, 1906 and 1910. Charles Kaufmann and The Longfellow Chorus of
Portland, Maine are filming a documentary to be released in 2013,
Samuel
Coleridge-Taylor and his music in America.
Filming is about two-thirds complete, according to Charles Kaufmann,
Artistic Director.
A
project on Kickstarter.com is currently accepting pledges, with a
goal of $15,000, to help finance
production.
Britain
had no system of royalties, so Coleridge-Taylor was paid only once
for each composition, no matter how successful it became. He held
multiple teaching and conducting positions in an effort to support
his family. This led to exhaustion which worsened the pneumonia from
which he died on Sept. 1, 1912, at age 37. This year has seen a
number of efforts to bring to light some of the many works of
Coleridge-Taylor which have fallen into neglect or were never
published or performed. One of the highlights has been the premiere
production of the composer's opera Thelma, in Croydon.
The
National Portrait Gallery of the United Kingdom is currently displaying
images from the life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, including the
painting done when he was about seven years old, and the photograph above.
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