RCM Museum celebrates the life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Posted in Articles, Arts, Biography, Media Archive, United Kingdom on 2018-01-30 04:38Z by Steven

RCM Museum celebrates the life of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Classical-music.com: The official website of BBC Music Magazine
2017-10-19

Anna Maria Barry, Museum Research Assistant
Royal College of Music’s Museum of Music


Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

The composer’s musical fight for civil rights is the focus of an intriguing new digital exhibition, explains Anna Barry

The Royal College of Music Museum has launched a new digital exhibition about composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (above). Released to coincide with Black History Month, the exhibition, entitled Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and the musical fight for Civil Rights celebrates the composer’s important role within civil rights movements in the UK and the US at the turn of the 20th century. Coleridge-Taylor was a student at the college and the exhibition draws on his remarkable collections which are held at its museum.

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born in London in 1875. His mother Alice was British, while his father hailed from Freetown in Sierra Leone. Dr Daniel Taylor had met Alice while studying in Britain, but most likely returned to West Africa without realising that she was pregnant. He never met his son. The young Coleridge-Taylor was given a violin by his maternal grandfather, and soon displayed great musical talent. He joined the Royal College of Music in 1890, studying composition under Charles Villiers Stanford. Coleridge-Taylor soon became a musical celebrity thanks to his trilogy of cantatas, known collectively as The Song of Hiawatha. Until World War II, this was one of the most performed choral pieces in Britain, rivalled only by Handel’s Messiah and Mendelssohn’s Elijah

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Ten black composers whose works deserve to be heard more often

Posted in Articles, Biography, Europe, History, Media Archive, United Kingdom, United States on 2015-10-05 19:30Z by Steven

Ten black composers whose works deserve to be heard more often

The Guardian
2015-06-02

John Lewis


English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). Photograph: Unknown/Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

The newly formed Chineke orchestra aims to include a work by a composer of ethnicity in each of its concert programmes. John Lewis looks at some of the neglected writers whose music might finally get an airing

In the past 200 years, dozens of prominent black composers from America and other parts of the African diaspora have fought to be recognised by the western classical tradition. The earliest example is Chevalier de Saint-Georges (1745-99). Born in Guadeloupe, the son of a wealthy plantation owner and a female slave, Saint-George was brought to France at a young age. As well as being a champion fencer, a violin teacher to Marie Antoinette and a colonel in the republican army, his prodigious musical talents led to him being dubbed “le Mozart noir”. He was a prolific composer (with several operas, 15 violin concertos, symphonies and numerous chamber works to his name) and a rare French exponent of early classical violin composition. (Listen to Chi-chi Nwanoku’s radio documentary about him here.)…

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