[Violinists
Hung Wo, left, and Claire Sakai Hazzard, cellist Joanna Morrison and
violist Ethan Pernela, members of Chamber Music Hawaii, will perform
music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor on Sunday. --Courtesy photo]
Chamber Music Hawaii features Coleridge-TaylorBY STEVEN MARK / smark@staradvertiser.com
This weekend’s Chamber Music Hawaii program features a little-known
composer whose rediscovery is finding resonance in the era of Obama.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was of Creole and Caucasian
descent, born in London to a mother with a musical family and a
mixed-race father from Sierra Leone. Raised in England, he became a
successful composer of classical music, and is thought to have been the
only black of his time to gain such prominence.
He was lionized by music aficionados and black intellectuals in the
United States, conducting major American orchestras and earning a
visitation with President Theodore Roosevelt, becoming one of the few
blacks to meet with an American president in that era. White musicians
in New York called him “the African Mahler.”
Chamber Music Hawaii musicians joined by University of Hawaii
professor Jonathan Korth on piano will perform one of Coleridge-Taylor’s
early works, a nonet for piano, strings and wind ensemble, in programs
Sunday and Jan. 28.
As a young composer, Coleridge-Taylor was championed by Elgar, and
his 1898 composition “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” — a setting of
Longfellow’s epic poem “The Song of Hiawatha” — was sold out for its
London premiere. That helped to make the composer a hero to American
blacks.
He would visit the U.S. three times between 1903 and 1910, a period
that saw some of “the first manifestations of the American civil rights
movement,” said Charles Kaufman, a composer, conductor and choral
director who is making a documentary about Coleridge-Taylor. It was a
time when leaders like W.E. Dubois and Booker T. Washington, both of
whom praised Coleridge-Taylor in various writings, were confronting Jim
Crow laws and the backlash against equal rights for freed slaves.
“Here is this guy from England who has none of the restrictions they
have in the United States … and he excels wherever he goes,” said
Kaufman. “So the American intelligentsia in the black community are
looking at Coleridge-Taylor and saying, ‘This is what we want.’”
Though steeped in British Victorian tradition, he would go on to
incorporate influences from these experiences into his music,
orchestrating melodies from the West Indies, Africa and African-American
cultures to beautiful effect.
His promise was cut short by premature death from illness in 1912, while only in his 30s. Coleridge-Taylor’s early death rendered him “the ‘Invisible Man’ of classical music,” said Kaufman. In that era, black musicians were generally disinclined to study
European music. In addition, “Victorian” music was buried in the wake of
the world wars and more modern styles, Kaufman said.
Now, however, Coleridge-Taylor is beginning to regain some deserved
attention. Aside from Kaufman’s film, which he plans to release this
spring, a Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Foundation has been established in the
United Kingdom. New works have been commissioned in his name. Kaufman
reports that in Washington D.C., a Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society has
been established, performing his music.
The composer’s nonet is a student work, Kaufman pointed out: “It
shows that he was a very, very talented composition student. You won’t
think of it as student work. Every piece of music I’ve run into by
Coleridge-Taylor is melodious, fun to play and fun to listen to.”
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