This part-letter, in the hand of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, has been folded and pasted onto an album page. It reads, in part, “By the way, is there a chance of getting a word in the “Mail” about our performance of “Acis & Galatea”, by the Handel Society of which I am the conductor. We have tremendous audiences and our Society numbers about three hundred. I wish you could for the performances will be fine, and the chorus really sing (splendidly ?).”
Coleridge-Taylor was conductor of the Handel Society from 1904 until his death in 1912. Born in 1875, his mother was English, and his father was from Sierra Leone, making him an important character in Afro-British music history. The Africana Encyclopaedia says of him, “he was also a leading exponent of Pan-Africanism, which emphasized the importance of a shared African heritage as the touchstone of black cultural identity.“ His most enduring work is “Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast” composed in 1898, but part of his legacy is for musicians of African descent. As Jeffrey Green writes: “By including African, Afro-American, and Afro-Caribbean elements in his compositions in melody and in title, as well as by being visibly and proudly of African descent, the music and the achievements of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had made black concert musicians proud and able to walk tall, especially in America where the compositions of European masters dominated in concert hall programs.”