One last question remains: what might have been?
One must begin by stressing the fact that SCT was a young composer: his meteoric rise to fame & often formidable orchestral technique can blind us to fact that, born 15 August 1875, SCT had only just reached his thirty-seventh birthday when he died.
Granted: other composers have done more in shorter lifetimes (to restrict the argument to younger contemporaries, the music of George Butterworth (1885-1916) in England or Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) in France stands up as starkly - almost self-consciously - mature in comparison with SCT's)... but composers like Butterworth & Boulanger (&, of course, Mozart before them) are unquestionably the exceptions rather the rule. SCT might just have been a later starter.
There a number of reasons for this.
SCT was something a jobbing composer, usually working on specific commissions, almost always with particular musicians in mind: the Platonic ideal of a private musical vision to be communicated with passionate purity wasn't (generally) on his agenda. This isn't the same as saying that SCT was totally indifferent to such concepts (the composition of the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (1905), apart from offering an interesting suggestion of where SCT's future may have offered, clearly reflect his ideals for an African-English music); but they clearly weren't as innate to SCT as they were for composers as different as Elgar, Delius or even Grainger.
On the other hand: SCT's music does show a clear sense of development throughout his short career; so one might reasonably consider what may have happened had SCT lived for another half century. It's entirely possible: RVW - born three years prior to SCT in 1872 - was still active as a composer when he died in 1958; while William Havergal Brian (1876-1972) - born one year after SCT - wrote his last symphony (the 32nd) in 1968.
Had Elgar (1857-1934) died aged 37, for example, we would have known him only as the composer of a minor (The Black Knight) cantata, the popular Salut d'Amour & a few instrumental minatures: all the major orchestral & choral works (including the two symphonies; Enigma variations; the violin & cello concerti & The Dream of Gerontius... even the Pomp & Circumstance marches) postdate Elgar's thirty-seventh birthday (1894).
RVW's worklist aged 37 is just as skimpy: born 1872; by 1909 he had edited the English Hymnal, written two underrated vocal works (On Wenlock Edge & Toward the Unknown Region) & was struggling to find a performance for his newly completed A Sea Symphony (Symphony No.1)... all of the best-known RVW scores - from the Thomas Tallis Fantasia (1910) to the Symphony in E minor (Symphony No.9) (premiered shortly before the composer's death in 1958) - date from an almost fifty years' worth of overtime RVW had on his younger contemporary....
(Writing as someone who believes that the nine symphonies of RVW form the finest symphonic cycle - not excluding the Sibelius 7 or Shostakovich 15 - & that Job - A Masque for Dancing is the greatest orchestral score of this musically prodigious century; the confusion in people's faces when i remind them that - for his entire career - the (three years younger) SCT was the man of promise, not RVW, is fascinating to see)
SCT may very well have followed the line suggested by the Twenty-Four Negro Melodies; & become a more overtly mature (maybe even more overtly politicalicised African-English) artist...
... but (for a number of reasons), I personally find this a little bit unlikely: while questions of African(-American) musical culture generally inspired SCT to his greatest artistic efforts, he was equally pleased to turn out short, pleasant light classic-style minatures as well as exotic popular cantatas throughout his career. This tends to suggest an alternative scenario; where SCT continued with a career more-or-less as it was, steadily increasing his profile as a conductor while mixing popular light classic in the style we now tend to associate with Coates & Ketelby with the occasional, deliberate (probably African-inspied) masterpiece.
The career of Hamilton Harty (1879-1941) offers an interesting comparison here: born four years after SCT, Harty was originally known as a composer & accompanying pianist only; but by 1911, he was regularly premiering all his major compositions. Shortly afterwards, he was engaged as co-conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra's Queen's Hall Concert series; which began a steady climb - interrupted by a period in the Royal Navy Volunteer Reserve during the Great War - to his two best known musical posts: that of director of the Halle Orchestra, Manchester (1920-1933); & as director of the BBC Symphony Orchestra (1933-1941). Through this, Harty continued to compose his (once quite popular) scores; suggesting a possible niche for SCT's future.
(Donald Tovey (1875-1940) offers another interesting sidelight to our alternate universe SCT: although (still) highly regarded as a critic & teacher, even Tovey suspected that his own, somewhat Regerian neo-classicism was passe in the post-Great War cultural environment... but in 1914, Tovey became the musical lynchpin at Reid University, Edinburgh; & was able to carve out a secure career here as an educationalist & musician without having to deal with the uncertainties of the outside musical world.
(Tovey's music - as with SCT's - is grotesquely underrated: the sooner we get decent recordings of the three major orchestral works (including the massive Cello Concerto (1934), described (dryly) by the composer as "an hour of Pablo Casals with orchestral accompaniment") & the opera, The Bride of Dionysus (1918), the better.
(I hate to say it: but this sounds like the topic for a new essay....)
Unlike Harty (& Tovey, of course), though, SCT was African; &, as such, had a certain role (or is it role-model?) thrust upon him. Had SCT lived as long as RVW or Brian, he would have seen the Great War, a Great Depression, the rise of Naziism & the Second World War, the dismantling of the British Empire & even, conceivably, the first race riots in England in 1960... in all these events, the actions of an African-English pillar of the Establishment would've developed a remarkable degree of resonance beyond what any single man should have to deal with.
Consider just one (of many) possible scenarios: given the composer's increasing mobility, it's quite conceivable that SCT could have been in US when the Great War broke out. The pressures on the African-English composer to remain in a (neutral) US would have been considerable under these circumstances (as indeed they were for Benjamin Britten when he was caught abroad on the outbreak of WWII); & whatever he did, he ran the risk of alienating a large proportion of his audience (the English, certainly, if he stayed... the US-Americans, probably, if he left). As the face of African culture in England, SCT's role in the propaganda war would have been substantial....
In short: as a man & as an artist, SCT was facing some difficult decisions: decisions his untimely death meant he never actually had to make....
The lives of some composers are strangely detached from their work: J S Bach is an obvious example. Others meld their life & art so totally that a separation of the two becomes virtually impossible: Skryabin immediately springs to mind.
A third category also exists: the composer whose life seems almost to overtake the art, coloring it & smothering it & adapting it in all kinds of ways, mostly never intended by the composer. Examples of this kind of artist are rarer: Gottschalk, certainly; probably Ives & Scelsi as well.
In researching this essay, I've spent several months listening to SCT's music, studying his scores (MIDIing the easier ones), & churning through all the biographical information I can access; & yet my subject still remains strangely diffuse, unfocused, almost hidden in plain sight: an African face shining with suburban Englishness, living happily in a Croydon family home. No doubt even I am struggling to see clearly through my T+100 years chronoscope, tricked by the pigment of SCT's skin into looking for something extraodinary in the man; & unable to face what the most composer seemed most dearly to want to: a young English musical craftsman, rightly proud of his African heritage....
He was no doubt right; as I am inevitably wrong....
This, then, is my (strictly personal) celebration of the life (& art) of Samuel Coleridge Taylor, a composer hidden in plain sight....
Three books on SCT & his music have been continually referred to during the preparation of this piece:
* The fine biography by Geoffrey Self (The Hiawatha Man - The Life & Work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Scolar Press; 1995) is pretty much essential reading on the subject... he's waded through the myth (bordering on legend) regarding his subject with good humor & a sure narrative sense. I have only question mark with his study... a minor one; but (again) a demonstration of the problems involved in looking at SCT with a T+100 chronoscope.
Right at the end of the book (p.262), Self wonders aloud why SCT was not officially honored during his lifetime; with the implication that he was being either actively or passively snubbed by the musical Establishment. One might have been better to ask whether - had SCT been white; & given a similar biography - would he have been likely to receive significant honors by age thirty-seven... & - assuming that no token was received in the full flush of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast success - the answer is almost certainly no. Honors then & now have inevitably been for the rich, the central Establishment (these two categories are, of course, synonymous), the elder statesman or -woman & the popular favorite fallen on hard times; & none of these categories could really be said to have included SCT in 1912.
(His US-American experiences - which would have been major triumphs for a young conductor now - were of questionable relevance in the English context at the turn of the century).
This aside is, however, a rare error of judgement in a fine text; which includes a full worklist & discography: will we be using S (Self) numbers for SCT's music in the future as we already use S (Searle) numbers for Liszt's? I wonder....
* As mentioned before, William Tortolano's book (Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Anglo-Black Composer - The Scarecrow Press; 1977) has a more overtly politicised agenda & some slightly questionable factual statements (there's no evidence that the terminally shy SCT really knew his older contemporary, RVW, say; although RVW was certainly have been certainly aware of the music of SCT... a claim by Foss (mentioned elsewhere) that SCT's symphonic cantatas may have acted as an inspiration for similar works by RVW are plausible, if probably unproveable); but Tortolano's musical descriptions of SCT's major works are lovingly drawn.
Tortolano also reprints a number of short essays by SCT on music
&
his art: doubly valuable, since SCT was such a private artist,
quite
without the 19th & 20th century artist's obsession with
manifestos...
* ... all of which makes Avril Coleridge-Taylor's memoir-cum-propaganda piece on behalf of her father's music (The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor - Dennis Dobson; 1979) especially useful... both as a biography; but also as a collection of anecdotes regarding SCT's approach to - & thinking about - his own music (most of my references about SCT's preferred works derives from Avril, for example). AC-T - a conductor/composer in her own right - also has the advantage of hands-on experience with the music she is describing; whereas Self & Tortolano (&, of course, myself) have to base their descriptions of SCT's music from scores, recordings or reviews.
The second part of the book - a short autobiography entitled My Father's Daughter - makes for sombre, if valuable reading....
The short article (by Stephen Banfield) on the composer included in Grove VI is also well worth a read; while Percy M Young's Musical Times article ("Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912"; CXVI, 1590; ps703-05) is also useful.
I have been unable to access copies of the books by Jessie Coleridge-Taylor ("A Memory Sketch: Personal Reminiscences of my Husband, Genius & Musician" - 1943) & W C Berwick Sayers ("Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Musician: His Life & Letters" - 1917; rev. 1927); although both are substantially quoted in the three texts listed above. A dramatised documentary on the composer ("The African Suite: Ethiopia Saluting the Colours"; produced for BBC Television in 1993) is similarly unavailable to me.
"The Cartoon History of the Universe" by Larry Gornick (Doubleday; 1990, 1994) has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with SCT... but should be read anyway....
Better news arrives in the form of the Chicago-based Cedille Records label; which has announced a recording - by Rachel Barton & the Encore Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Hege - of the Violin Concerto, due for release in November 1997. The recording ("Violin Concertos by Black Composers of the 18th & 19th Centuries") will have the catalogue no. CDR 90000 035. Comments on this recording will be added to this site as soon as a copy becomes available to me.
(The current (September 1997) issue of the British Music Society "News" reports of another new recording of SCT's chamber music, to be released (next year?) of the Afka label. No catalog number at present; & as with the Violin Concerto, more information will be posted here as soon as it becomes available)
In preparing this review, I've also be able to listen to a tape of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast conducted by Malcolm Sargent (the Lewis/Royal Choral Society/Philharmonia recording) as well as the full George Weldon/Philharmonia version of SCT's Petite Suite de Concert (two movements of which can sometimes be found - in Australia, at least - on a EMI Laser disc, 7 62529 2). Both recordings stand up fine on my (very basic) tape player; & would be valuable re-additions to the SCT discography.
(It would also be useful (given the conductor's long experience with SCT's music) to have Sargent's recording of The Death of Minnehaha (with Suddaby; Baker; Fry; the RCS & Royal Albert Hall Orchestra) available on disc)
The following works by SCT would seem fairly urgently in need of an outing: