Opus Illuminate Concert Series - #1 Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Welcome to the first installment of our Asynchronous Concerts! We will be premiering these virtual performances on YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram, so be sure to join us again soon.
Program:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Sonata in D minor, Op 28 for Violin and Piano
I. Allegro ma non tanto
Nathan Meltzer, violin
Jessica Xylina Osborne, piano
Program Notes:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, an English composer and conductor born to a British mother and Creole father from Sierra Leone in 1875, had ancestral ties to African-American slaves who went on to become Black Loyalists during the American Revolution. His grandfather bought him a violin in 1881, and the next year Samuel was noted by a music teacher, Joseph Beckwith, who gave him lessons for the next eight years. Later Samuel would return the favor by teaching Beckwith’s son. Samuel married Jessie Walmisley, a fellow student from the Royal College of Music, in 1899, despite objections by her parents on account of Samuel’s multi-racial lineage. At the wedding he was encountered with more than a few smug, racist remarks, including several by the clergyman.
In the first decade of the 20th century, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor became increasingly aware of his African roots and became more assertive about the casual racism he witnessed in his daily life. He was the youngest delegate at the First Pan-African Conference in 1900, through which he met Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois. His relationship with Dunbar eventually led to him setting some of Dunbar’s poetry to music. The same year, Hiawatha Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel’s first child, was born. In 1903 a second child was born, known as Avril Coleridge-Taylor. Avril grew up to excel as a pianist, conductor, and composer. As a result of often passing as white due to her ancestry being predominantly so, she was frequently allowed to work in capacities that were off-limits to most Black artists. However, she moved to South Africa in the 1950’s, and when the government there found out about her father Samuel having been Black, she was no longer permitted to work in her craft.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912 at the age of 37 from pneumonia, and allegedly overwork, and was survived by his wife and two children. In his Violin Sonata in D Minor, published in 1917, the first movement opens fairly melancholically, transitioning into a sweetly singing and reminiscent line, which turns more rambunctious and playful, but only briefly, then moving between characters with boldness. The piece is romantic in style, no doubt, though it also contains elements that call to fiddle traditions of the time, such as the sustaining of an open string alongside a melodic line, as well as the treatment of rhythm and double-stops on the violin.
Program note by Emily Singleton.
Opus Illuminate is an online concert series that is dedicated to programming and performing chamber music works by composers of historically underrepresented communities in a unique platform of free, online, pre-recorded, socially-distanced “Asynchronous Concerts.”