Twenty-Four Negro Melodies
The Irish pop-singer turned activist Bob Geldof titled his biography: "Is That It?" to reflect the nightmare of being a thirty year old has-been; & on his return to Croydon, SCT would have been forgiven for thinking much the same thing. The success of his tour does not seem to have greatly impacted on his marketability in England, though: he continued to be busy much as before; without any spectacular rushes of praise & profitable new commissions related to his US-American triumphs....
(It's always intrigued me what would have happened to the composer's career had his Washington concert been seen live via satellite on the BBC)
Not surprisingly, under the circumstances, immigration to the US was considered; but (equally unsurprisingly) dismissed as a viable option: SCT may well have been a cultural hero amongst African-Americans; but work in England seemed more reliable. The composer already had a wife & young family (the (unfortunately) named Hiawatha was born in 1900; Avril in 1903) to raise; so plenty - & profitable work - was essential... as mentioned above, SCT sold the rights to all his major scores - including Hiawatha's Wedding Feast - for flat fees only... the agreement which made composer royalties standard practice was only struck after SCT's death, (possibly) in part due to the way the popular composer was (quite legally) shafted over Hiawatha....
(Self quotes a letter from Stanford to Elgar:
"I am of course glad that your experience leads you to think that the big publishers are often everything that is considerate. I can tell you many cases where they are not. Some horrible cases. (...) If by accident you saw the accounts of Messrs Novello concerning Hiawatha, it might open your eyes a little as regards the 'considerate treatment of your composers'"
(The letter, surprisingly undated by Self (p.71), presumably belongs to the period immediately after SCT's death; where the issue of royalties - & the lack of same to the SCT estate - became a major issue (see below))
SCT continued to produce original scores, of course; but in the absence of royalties, conducting was by far the most reliable way for a young composer to make a living... & it should be no great surprise that many well known conductors first achieved success wielding the baton for their own music (Hamilton Harty - who's career parallels SCT in some intriguing ways - immediately springs to mind). SCT's capacity for work makes me tired just typing it up: from 1898 to 1903, he was chief conductor to the Croydon Symphony Orchestra; & when that orchestra collapsed, SCT bankrolled two further seasons of Coleridge-Taylor Orchestral Concerts with many of his former musicians. When this, distinctly too ambitious, orchestra also failed, a more modest String Players' Club was formed in 1906, with SCT as honorary leader.
Additional work took him further from home: from 1901 to 1904, SCT was resident conductor to the Westmoreland Festival; to which he added (from 1902 to 1907) a similar post with the Rochester Choral Society. In 1904, he became chief conductor to the Handel Society concerts, a post he held until his death (despite SCT's distinct ambivalence to the titular composer's work); while in the same year, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast clocked up its 200th performance in England alone, guaranteeing a steady supply of guest conducting spots for the composer.
The income which could be derived from teaching was not being ignored, either: SCT had been lecturing at the local Croydon Conservatoire since 1895... in 1903, he joined Trinity College of Music as professor of composition; & in 1905, added a similar post at the Crystal Palace School of Art & Music. Five years later, SCT added what was probably his most important teaching position: that of professor of composition at the well known Guildhall School of Music.
Choral & orchestral adjudication was another moderately profitable way of seeing the country (& Wales: SCT first appeared as an adjudicator at the famed Eisteddfodau in 1900... unfortunately (at least as far as I know) there were no frequent rail-travellers' points plans in SCT's day (he certainly could'ave used one)); while in his spare time (& i suppose he had some), SCT also became a house composer to the well known actor/theatrical entrepreneur, Herbert Beerbohm Tree.
(Does the word workaholic spring to mind?)
While none of SCT's jobs at this time were really in the first rank, many were significant; & they all put bread on the SCT table (the various conducting positions also no doubt helped build the composer's reputation as a solid & courteous musician & band-builder)... the downside of all this activity was that (as a residential conductor) SCT had little time - & (as a touring conductor) high demand - for new composition, a time-dilemma which he never really resolved during his lifetime.
For obvious reasons, much of the material dating from this period is open to the charge of professional hackwork; but with the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (1905) - a pioneering exercise in ethnomusicological composition of the type more commonly associated with Percy Grainger (& later, RVW, Britten, Bartok & Kodaly)... but published before Grainger's best-known work in the field - SCT moved into a startling new phase in his career....
(Stanford's comment (quoted by Avril CT) on receiving his complimentary copy of the score is intriguing: he suggests that SCT send a copy to Grainger "... who is greatly interested in folk-songs", establishing - amongst other things - that Grainger & SCT were doing their similar explorations in complete ignorance of each other's work; although the eagle-eared teacher also recognised that:
"... 'The Angels changed my Name', is an Irish tune, & also I think 'The Pilgrim's Song'. Like some of the negro tunes Dvorak got hold of, these have reached the American negroes through the Irish-Americans. A curious case of the transmigration of folk-songs" (Avril; p.72))
The set seems to have been written in the full flush of enthusiasm during & following the first US-American tour (SCT's introduction to the set - printed in full by Avril - is dated December 17, 1904). As with Grainger's best work in the field (qv, Brigg Fair & the Irish Tune from County Derry), SCT's treatment of his folk material is loving & discreet: each study is prefaced with a straight statement of the original melody, which is then developed (generally as a series of variations; occasionally as a free rhapsody or fantasia on the folk-theme) in the composition proper... but despite SCT's obvious respect for his material, the result is oddly (& profoundly) Eurocentric in both conception & execution....
(This fact - which probably seems odd to us now - is positively celebrated by the famed African-American educationist Booker T Washington in his preface for the edition (also quoted in full by Avril):
"It is especially gratifying at this time when interest in the plantation songs seems to be dying out with the generation that gave them birth, when Negro song is in too many minds associated with the 'rag' music & the more reprehensible 'coon' song, that the most cultivated musician of his race, a man of the highest aesthetic ideals, should seek to give permanence to folksongs of his people by giving them a new interpretation & an added dignity" (p.139/140)
(One has to remind oneself that the 'rag' composers Washington is dismissing includes Scott Joplin; & all the forefathers of modern jazz....)
Both the score to the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies & a recording of the complete work seem to be available; but writing - as i do - from Sydney, Australia makes this availability rather problematic. Theodore Presser has inherited the rights to the original Ditson publication; & will sell you a beautiful customer-print facsimile copy of the original edition...
... when they aren't reminding you that - as the work is safely out of copyright - you're quite within your rights to photocopy it yourself, that is.
The complete set has been recorded by Frances Walker; & available on Orion 7806 2 (this label, unfortunately, is not currently available in Australia); while extracts from the set were recorded as part of the Koch International disc of SCT's instrumental works, 37056-2.
Two of the themes collected included in the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies were to reappear in SCT's later music: I'm Troubled in Mind, a score originally derived from a Jubilee Singers collection of 1872 was used as the basis of one of SCT's finest orchestral pieces: the Symphonic Variations on an African Air (1906; performed - with the Ballade in A minor - by the Royal Liverpool PO/Llewellyn on the Argo recording listed above); while the The Bamboula (a melody probably better known in its virtuoso piano solo version by Louis Moreau Gottschalk (1829-1869)) - reappeared in SCT's 1910 "rhapsodic dance" for orchestra of the same name (recorded by the Bournemouth SO/Alwyn as a filler to their version of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast; see above). Both pieces are light classics of the first order; & well worthy of revival....
(One of interesting details in SCT's compositional career was the way his African (or African-American) cultural heritage often seemed to particularly inspire him, in much the same way that another, better-known, composing conductor (Leonard Bernstein) seemed to grow the proverbial extra arm & a leg whenever he embraced his (musical) Jewish heritage. Gottschalk is another composer with whom SCT has some intriguing parallels. Like SCT, Gottschalk was unquestionably an outsider in his own land: a Creole, he grew up a French-speaker in Anglophone US-America; & a fierce abolitionist & supporter of African-American music & culture in the slave-owning south. Like SCT, Gottschalk's music was also exotic & popular; but faded steadily from view following the composer's romantically young death.
(One sometimes wonders what kind of racial & cultural war-stories SCT would have exchanged with Paul Robeson had the composer lived long enough to see the singer's London triumphs (one biography on the singer - which will remain nameless to protect the guilty - suggests that they actually did meet (in 1926-7!)... which suggests that either someone was having the biographer on or the writer was confused between SCT & his son, Hiawatha)... on the other hand: what could an elderly LMG have told SCT about the indigenous music of Latin & South America?)
As the decade drew to a close - & with it, SCT's short life - the composer's career continued to develop, even if the Hiawatha's Wedding Feast lightning resolutely failed to strike twice. Two additional tours of the US reinforced the composer's reputation in the New World (during the 1910 tour, SCT found himself conducting exclusively white orchestras as well as African-American ensembles... something which wouldn't happen again until William Grant Still (1895-1975) did likewise almost two decades later); while a stream of minor masterpieces flowed from his pen; including the orchestral Petite Suite de Concert (1910; available in a historical (1931) performance by the Bournemouth Municipal Orchestra/Dan Godfrey (a long-time SCT supporter; & friend of the composer) on Pearl GEMMCD9965 as well as on the Marco Polo/RTE Concert O/Leaper collection mentioned above); the cantata A Tale of Old Japan (1911; not currently available) & the Violin Concerto (1912; recorded by Rachel Burton with Encore Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Hege; & due for release on the Cedille Records label (CDR 90000 035) later this year).
The Petite Suite de Concert is one of the masterpieces of the English Light Music tradition; & should be a lot better known that it is. In four short movements (La caprice de Nanette; Demande et response; Un sonnet d'amour & La tarantel's fretillente)...
(I have seen the English composer's love of foreign titles queried before. This wasn't just an SCT trait: for many years, Elgar would have been better known for his Salut d'Amour than anything else; while in the 1950s, RVW could happily write a Sinfonia Antartica as his seventh symphony (great Italian... lousy geography). A number of factors were probably relevant (including a simple taste for exotic names); but perhaps the most immediate was that most of these composers were writing with European publication in mind. All of this may help explain Grainger's peculiar crusade for purely English terminology in music... but I doubt it)
... the Petite Suite de Concert is a charm from beginning to end; & should have been enough to make the name of the composer on its own. Much as I enjoy the music of Butterworth, say, why the Petite Suite de Concert isn't as well known as his The Banks of Green Willow is beyond me....
(As was usually the case with SCT, the composer produced a piano reduction of the suite for mass consumption: the reduction was included on the Koch International instrumental music set; but neither this recording - or my copy of the Hawkes & Son score - has convinced me that the piano solo is an adequate substitute for SCT's subtle & tuneful orchestration)
According to Avril, SCT preferred his last cantata, A Tale of Old Japan (from the poem by Alfred Noyes) to Hiawatha's Wedding Feast... which makes a recording of the work absolutely essential in my book. The work was dedicated to the Stoeckel family (patrons of SCT's last US tour); & (if the vocal score is any indication) a powerful return to clear, text-driven vocal style of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast... it was also a popular hit; & in the years following the composer's death, it was the only one of his scores which threatened the Hiawatha cantatas in terms of popularity. The only real weakness is (again) the text, which SCT has watered-down from Noyes's already modified TV version of pretty nasty Japanese original.
It's probably safe to assume that - no matter how long he lived - SCT would never have written a work as joyously perverse as Turandot. Puccini he was not....
The Violin Concerto had a checkered history... right down to a copy of the full score & set of parts, hurriedly prepared for the US premiere, going down with the Titanic. Virtually the entire first version of the concerto was scrapped; although both the central movement (a striking setting of the spiritual Many Thousands Down) & the bizarre-sounding finale (based on Yankee Doodle of all things!) survive in short-score version (Tortolano seems to believe that the deleted Many Thousands Down movement - itself a replacement for SCT's first attempt at a central movement, which was based on another spiritual (Keep Me From Sinking Down) - is the correct second movement of the concerto). The work was commissioned for the US-American violinist Maud Powell, who also premiered the Tchaikovski, Sibelius & Bruch concerti in the US; & with Powell's determined advocacy, the work remained on the fringes of the repertoire in the years following the composer's death; but has rarely been heard since: Ms Burton's new recording is therefore definitely one to look forward to.
& then - suddenly - SCT collapsed & died....
The story seems startling in its banality: on the 28th August, the still-young composer collapsed at West Croydon station while waiting for a train... he was carried home; but died a few days a later of acute pneumonia exacerbated by chronic overwork (Self outlines the foreshadowings of health-trouble in his book; while admitting that there was little obvious warning of the composer's imminent collapse). There's little doubt that the composer's death was a shock to the London music scene - perhaps even more so to his followers in the US - & his funeral became a major public event.
Tributes
were
plentiful: with Hubert Parry's in The Musical Times (1912;
p.637... reprinted by Tortolano; p.133) only the most distinguished.
The
composer's father had died in Sierra Leone in 1904; but word of his
son's
death triggered a short message of acknowledgement:
"Sent of behalf of unknown relatives in distant Sierra Leone, who wished him well in life - and Peace in death" (Self; p.260)
One of the most spectacular acknowledgements of SCT's death came from a group which called themselves:
"... the sons & daughters of West Africa resident in London" (Self; p.260)
This extraordinary wreath used white flowers to create the shape of the African continent; with SCT's ancestral home (an ancestral home he never actually saw, one must stress again), Sierra Leone, highlighted in red....
(Oddly, I'm reminded of another transcultural funeral: that of the Gottschalk, following his death in Rio in 1869... see Starr - Bamboula!: The Life of Musical Times of Louis Moreau Gottschalk; OUP, 1995)
Unfortunately, a political feeding frenzy started almost immediately: while SCT's money problems (like Mozart's) can be somewhat overstated (although the composer was clearly badly underpaid for Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, his (fatal?) work ethic meant that the family's life had been materially reasonably comfortable: Self quotes a quite respectable average yearly income from music sales alone of £119 annually at the time of the composer's death (p.265)), what SCT hadn't been able to do was set up his family's future from the money he earnt; with the result that his sudden death left his widow & children fairly destitute, with little reliable income & only a few unpublished manuscripts to sell.
(The SCT family also commissioned orchestrations (usually by P E Fletcher of earlier instrumental works to sell as new SCT "compositions". Romance of the Prairie Lilies (included on the Marco Polo set) is one of these orchestrations)
A memorial concert was hurriedly organised & raised £1440 for the family; while the Guildhall School of Music arranged free musical education for both of SCT's children....
(It turned out to be a good (cultural) investment on behalf of the Guildhall; as both children were to be active in the London music scene: Hiawatha as a conductor; & Avril as a pianist, conductor & composer. Not surprisingly, both were also strongly associated with their father's music: Avril as a writer & conductor; while Hiawatha conducted the ballet music in the mighty Hiawatha pageants of the 1920s & 30s).
Easing the crisis further, in 1914, Jessie was granted a Civil List Pension of £100 per year:
"... in recognition of your husband, the late Mr Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, as a composer of music" (Self; p.265)
After the immediate scare of their breadwinner's death, the future of the Coleridge-Taylor family was, therefore, moderately secure; but - perhaps fortunately (if not for them, certainly for others) - too many people were too well aware that they were receiving zero income from most of his compositions... even when the giant pageant-style staged performances of the Hiawatha cantatas filled the Royal Albert Hall (see below). Two years after the composer's death, the Performing Right Society was formed in England, with the express goal of improving the composer's lot... but - while the plight of SCT's family was no doubt on people's mind when this happened - the society was unable to further help the family of at least one recently deceased popular composer....
(Looking at this sorry history, I can't help wondering whether the benevolence of the Holst & RVW Trusts - set up in the wills of two significant beneficiaries of the Performing Rights Society agreement to assist other composers only (both trusts explicitly forbid trust assets being used to subsidise the music of the titular composers) - reflected their memory of the nightmares which could be faced even by a composer as successful as SCT)
to continue: hit the link to Hiawatha's Departure.
to return to the Samuel Coleridge Taylor cover sheet, just hit the link here.
Page created by Robert Clements