A. Kori Hill
It’s time to meet Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. He grew up in the last few decades of the Victorian era and was a celebrated composer. Born in London, England, in 1875, Samuel’s parents were Alice Hare Martin and Dr. Peter Hughes Taylor. Samuel never met his father, who moved back to Sierra Leone before finding out that Alice was pregnant. She named her son after the famous English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Called Coleridge by his family, he was raised by his mother and grandfather. His grandad, Benjamin Holmans, was his first violin teacher, and he paid for Coleridge’s lessons when it became clear the kid was really good. At 15, he started studying violin and composition at the Royal College of Music. It was there he began to focus on composing.
From 1899 until his death from pneumonia in 1912, Coleridge-Taylor was seen as an exciting new voice in English composition. Edward Elgar was a vocal champion of his works and audiences in the United States established choral societies in his name and programmed his music. Coleridge also collaborated with two major American artists of his era: Paul Laurence Dunbar and Maud Powell.
Dunbar was a poet from Dayton, Ohio known for his poems on Black culture written in dialect. Coleridge had met Paul in 1897 in England, and they kept up a collaboration that included Coleridge setting some of Dunbar’s poetry to music.
He was also becoming interested in American music and culture, especially Negro spirituals and the relationship between Black people around the world. Coleridge wrote 24 Negro Melodies, Op. 59 (1905) for piano. It’s a piece that blurs the line between an arrangement and a reimaging; you hear melodies that you recognize, but they’re presented in a new context: the texture is sometimes homophonic or polyphonic; there’s chromaticism; there might be phrases longer than you’d expect if you were to listen to vocalists. Pick out one of the movements and compare it to the original spiritual. What is familiar? How does Coleridge set the melody and take it in new directions?
Coleridge’s collaboration with American violinist Maud Powell left us with two works: his Violin Concerto (1912) and Maud’s arrangement of Coleridge’s arrangement of Deep River. Maud was a major concert artist from Peru, Illinois. She was known for concertizing across the United States, bringing music to audiences outside of the major music hubs of New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
Coleridge wrote his violin concerto for Maud and sent the orchestral parts to America–on the Titanic. He had to rewrite a new set and couldn’t attend the premiere due to illness. The concerto has only recently reentered the repertoire and is a gorgeous piece of modest virtuosity and catchy melodies.
Maud’s arrangement of Coleridge’s Deep River is fiery, a short showman piece. Listen to bits of both works. How do they reflect what these artists – one who’d studied violin, another who made her living playing it – think about what a violin can do: technically and expressively?
