Avril Coleridge-Taylor

Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor (8 March 1903 – 21 December 1998) was an English pianist, conductor, and composer. She was the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie (née Walmisley).

Gwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor
Avril Coleridge-Taylor
BornGwendolen Avril Coleridge-Taylor
(1903-03-08)8 March 1903
South Norwood, London
Died(1998-12-21)December 21, 1998
Seaford, East Sussex
LanguageEnglish
NationalityBritish
EducationTrinity College of Music

Biography

She was born in South Norwood, London, the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his wife Jessie Walmisley. They had met as students at the Royal College of Music. She had an older brother Hiawatha. Gwendolyn wrote her first composition, Goodbye Butterfly, at the age of twelve. Later, she won a scholarship for composition and piano at Trinity College of Music in 1915, where she was taught by Gordon Jacob and Alec Rowley.[1]

In 1924 Coleridge-Taylor married an Englishman, Harold Dashwood, in the Croydon parish church. She composed and conducted using her maiden name. After their divorce she dropped her first name, thereafter going by Avril professionally.[2]

In 1933, Coleridge-Taylor made her debut as a conductor at the Royal Albert Hall. She was the first female conductor of H.M.S. Royal Marines and a frequent guest conductor of the BBC Orchestra and the London Symphony Orchestra. She was the founder and conductor of both the Coleridge-Taylor Symphony Orchestra and its accompanying musical society in the 1940s, as well as the Malcolm Sargent Symphony Orchestra. In 1939, she moved to Buxted in East Sussex where she had views over the South Downs.

Her compositions include large-scale orchestral works, as well as songs, keyboard, and chamber music. They include a Piano Concerto in F minor, To April (1929), the Spring Magic suite (1933), Sussex Landscape, op 27 (1936), From the Hills, In Memoriam R.A.F., Wyndore (Windover) for choir and orchestra, and the Golden Wedding Ballet Suite for orchestra.[3] Sussex Landscape was revived in 2019 by the Chineke! Orchestra at a Queen Elizabeth Hall concert on 22 April, 2019.[4] Wyndore, composed in Alfriston in 1936 and inspired by an Aldous Huxley poem ("I have tuned my music to the trees"),[5] is a seven minute song without words.[6] The first performance was organised by the Philharmonic Society and took place at Birkenhead on 16th February 1937, conducted by Dr Teasdale Griffiths. The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra will give its first UK performance in 82 years on 7 March 2020 at Boxgrove Priory, Chichester.[7]

Coleridge-Taylor had a tour of South Africa in 1952, during the period of apartheid.[8] Originally she was supportive of, or neutral to the racial segregation; she was taken as white as she was at least three-quarters white in ancestry.[9] When the government learned that she was one-quarter black (her paternal grandfather was a Creole from Sierra Leone), it would not allow her to work as a composer or conductor.[10] In 1957, Coleridge-Taylor wrote the Ceremonial March to celebrate Ghana's independence.[11]

In later life she wrote a biography of her composer father, The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (London: Dobson, 1979).[12] The book includes her life and memories of her father. She also published compositions under the pseudonym Peter Riley.[13]

Coleridge-Taylor died in a nursing home in Seaford on the Sussex coast in late 1998.[2]

Works

Chamber music
  • Idylle for flute and piano, Op. 21
  • Impromptu for flute and piano, Op. 33
  • A Lament for flute and piano, Op. 31

Keyboard music
  • Impromptu, Op. 9
  • Rhapsody for piano, Op. 174

Orchestral music
  • Sussex Landscape, (1940) Op. 27
  • Wyndore (1936)
  • Concerto in F minor for piano and orchestra

Songs
  • Goodbye Butterfly, Op. 1
  • Mister Sun, Op. 2
  • Silver Stars, Op. 3
  • Who Knows?, Op. 4
  • April, Op. 5
  • The Dreaming Water Lily, Op. 6
  • The Rustling Grass, Op. 7
  • The Entranced Hour, Op. 8
  • Song, Op. 29
  • Nightfall, Op. 43
  • Apple Blossom, Op. 44
  • Sleeping and Waking, Op. 45[14]
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References
  1. Sadie, Julie Anne and Rhian Samuel. Eds. The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers. Macmillan: New York, 1995.
  2. "014: Gwendolen (Avril) Coleridge-Taylor 1924 « Jeffrey Green. Historian". Jeffreygreen.co.uk. Retrieved 2019-03-10.
  3. Manuscripts held at the Royal College of Music, Rcm.ac.uk
  4. "Chineke! Orchestra". Berginaldrash.com. Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  5. "Song of Poplars" from The Defeat of Youth and Other Poems (1918)
  6. "New Music". The Musical Times. 80 (1154): 261–266. 1939. doi:10.2307/923034. Retrieved 6 August 2020 – via JSTOR.
  7. "On Windover Hill". Castleymusic.com. Retrieved 6 August 2020.
  8. Charles Kay, "The Marriage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Jessie Walmisley", Black Music Research Journal, Vol. 21, No. 2, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (Autumn, 2001), pp. 159-178; via JSTOR
  9. "Daughter of Famous Composer Gives OK to S. African Bias", Jet Magazine, 1 December 1955
  10. Bill Greenwell, "Coleridge Taylor", Lost Lives Archived 2014-09-25 at the Wayback Machine, personal website
  11. "Avril Coleridge-Taylor", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography; retrieved 26 Jan 2015
  12. Coleridge-Taylor, Avril (1979-12-10). The heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Dobson. ISBN 9780234770894.
  13. Avril Coleridge-Taylor, The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, London: Dobson, 1979 (e.g., p. 154)
  14. Coleridge-Taylor (1979), The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, pp. 154-6.

Sources
  • Cohen, Aaron, International Encyclopedia of Women Composers, New York: Hamish Books & Music, 1981.
  • Hixon, Donald, Women in Music: An Encyclopedic Biobibliography, Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow P, 1993.
  • Sadie, Julie Ann, & Samuel, Rhian, The Norton/Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, New York: Macmillan, 1995.
  • Sadie, Stanley, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, New York: Macmillan, 2001.

Further reading
  • Coleridge-Taylor, Avril. (1979) The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor . London: Dobson P.
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