Samuel Coleridge-Taylor summarized his ambitions concisely: “I want to be nothing in the world except what I am — a musician,” he was quoted as having said in an obituary published six days after his death in 1912. Despite his own wishes, the famously humble composer left a legacy far more complex than that of a mere creator of music, defined by complex questions of identity and artistry that remain ever-relevant as we honor the 150th anniversary of his birth on August 15.
Born in London in 1875, Coleridge-Taylor never knew his father, a surgeon from Sierra Leone, who had a brief relationship with his mother, a working-class white British woman. After demonstrating talent as a singer and violinist in primary school, he matriculated at the Royal College of Music, graduating with early acclaim as a composer of inventive chamber music and virtuosic solo writing for the violin.
In 1900, Coleridge-Taylor scored a massive hit with Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, an oratorio based on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem The Song of Hiawatha. At the time of his first United States tour in 1904 — during which he sold out concert halls in Philadelphia, Chicago, and New York and was personally received by President Theodore Roosevelt in the White House — he was among the most recognized composers on both sides of the Atlantic, revered for his colorful orchestration and keen melodic instinct, as well as his efforts to champion the indigenous music of Africa and the African diaspora.
His popularity quickly ebbed in the decades following his death of pneumonia, at 37. And despite a recent uptick in interest, Coleridge-Taylor’s music remains infrequently performed and even less often recorded. This is an issue being addressed head-on by the Grammy-winning conductor Michael Repper, who is currently Music Director of the Ashland Symphony Orchestra, Mid-Atlantic Symphony Orchestra, and the Northern Neck Orchestra of Virginia.
Repper says his new album with the National Philharmonic Orchestra, released this month on Avie Records, was born “half out of love for Coleridge-Taylor’s music and half frustration that there wasn’t more of it.” Composed entirely of premiere Coleridge-Taylor recordings — including the early Ballade for Violin and Orchestra (featuring violinist Curtis Stewart), the concert overture Touissaint L’Ouverture, and an original orchestration of his 24 Negro Melodies — the project is the culmination of decades of scholarship and a testament to the brilliance and urgency of the composer’s musical language.
Watch our full conversation with Repper here, find an edited transcript below, and listen to WRTI this Friday (and beyond) to hear selections from the new album.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor lived a brief but really fascinating and rich life. Let’s start at the beginning. He was born in London on August 15, 1875. What kind of circumstances was he born into?
He led a complicated life because of his family dynamic. He never knew his father and he was essentially raised by his mother’s family. It was London in the late 1900s, so unless you were born into immense wealth, life was complicated for everybody.
Coleridge-Taylor was of mixed race, so there are also all kinds of added complications there too. But he was very fortunate to have been discovered to have musical talent from a very young age and to have fallen into violin. His talent was very well-recognized. In fact, around the middle of his life, more people knew of him than they do now, despite the legacy of his work. And so that’s a huge part of why we wanted to do this project.
He ended up studying at the Royal College of Music, and he continued to study the violin, piano, organ, clarinet, and most importantly, composition. What were his early influences as a performer and a composer, and what was his initial style like, musically?
He was writing a lot of varied music, but for the violin too, because that was his earliest instrument he was studying very seriously. The Ballade that’s on our album is actually his Opus Four. It’s a very early work, originally conceived for violin and orchestra and for violin and piano.
It was only performed, we think, twice, possibly three times total. In terms of the style of his early writing, there is a lot of risk-taking in the sense of really going for virtuosic writing. He understood that he himself also was a very good violinist and could show it through the music that he was playing.
I think the thing that stands out the most about his early writing and what makes him remarkable is his skill, not just as a composer, but as an orchestrator. Orchestrating is very, very, very difficult. You've got 20 different people that you could possibly give a melody to and understanding how orchestras work in that way to make your music shine is a completely different skill from composition. It’s something that he showed skill at from a very early age.
Beyond the orchestration, is there anything else that makes the Ballade stand out?
Coleridge-Taylor really had a way with a melody. His melodies are very memorable, and you come away singing each one of the melodies from the tunes. He had a mastery of form. The Ballade toes the line between a rhapsody, where it has a quasi-improvisatory feel and a very solid structure. This is a piece that should enter the rotation for advanced violinists, students, and people who are looking for different music to play. It should be part of the standard repertoire violinists learn.
Coleridge-Taylor’s mixed-race heritage was central in how his music was perceived throughout his life, and it remains central to our understanding of his biography today. How did he perceive and talk about his own racial identity? What was his relationship with the music of Africa and the African diaspora?
He viewed himself unequivocally as a Black man. He was also very interested in the music of the African diaspora. When he came to the United States, he heard the music of the Fisk Singers and he was hearing Negro spirituals and was interested in working on that music. He kind of famously said that what Dvořák did for the Bohemian, what Grieg did for the Norwegian, what Brahms has done for the Hungarian, I want to do for spirituals. So he wrote this set of 24 Negro Melodies, which are still played today, of course. One of the things on our album is an orchestration [of five of the Melodies] that Samuel Coleridge-Taylor did, but never published.
One of the special things about this album is that we're playing this suite, which we think is probably the first time it’s ever been played anywhere, alongside a set of three recompositions that violinist Curtis Stewart did in the last couple of years. Those are done in modern blues, folk, bluegrass, different genres of modern violin playing, which I think gives these spirituals a life beyond that the composer would’ve wanted. It was very exciting how it all came together.
I was really moved to hear not only the suite as Coleridge-Taylor had nearly completed it, but also hearing the other arrangements in dialogue, because I think they’re so respectful of his musical legacy and of the nature of these melodies, but also really make it contemporary in a fresh and urgent way.
I appreciate that. He was also a very clean hand writer, and so we’re lucky because we could have ended up with manuscripts that were a mess. In almost every case, it was very easy to tell exactly what he wanted.
Coleridge-Taylor ended up touring the United States three times. What kind of imprint did his music and figure make on American musical life and culture at the turn of the century?
He was very well respected, not just here, but also in the UK. There’s absolutely no question about that. In fact, the King gave his descendants a pension when he died, which was unbelievably rare.
Coleridge-Taylor wrote that one of his favorite composers was Dvořák, who was doing a lot of work here in the United States, interacting with and adapting in some cases music that came from the Black tradition. Coleridge-Taylor, despite being an English composer, was taking that all in when he was here in the United States and part of that growing tradition.
Can you tell me more about the first piece that appears on the album, the Ouverture Overture?
The piece is called Toussaint L’Ouverture. He was the leader of the revolution in Haiti that freed it from French colonial rule. It is a soaring, musically brilliant work, in the classic Coleridge-Taylor style. It’s in a loose sonata form, which means that you have two main themes that play off of each other, and in the middle you have a development section where he develops the ideas. The second theme is this lush, soaring, huge theme with the strings that go way high and brass that create this sort of couch for everybody to sit in. It’s a hallmark, very Romantic. It's militaristic in a sense, as you could expect, because it was written about a military leader. It has a march-like, driving force.
Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912 at the age of just 37, of pneumonia. How was his musical legacy maintained in the years and decades following his life? Why do you speculate that it’s taken so long for his music to sort of reenter the mainstream? Because, as you said, it was so popular in his time.
This was 1912 when he died. At that time, I think if you made it to 40, you were lucky. If you made it to 50, you were extraordinary. Getting music published and distributed in the 1910s and 1920s was infinitely more difficult than it is today. There was no Internet. If you wanted to share music from England to the U.S., or from the U.S. into Europe, it had to go on a boat, so everybody faced challenges. It is also very fair to say that anybody who wasn’t white and male at that time faced unbelievable challenges. I think that the same sort of bias that the classical music industry is starting to grapple with, honestly, was infinitely worse a hundred years ago. I think that Coleridge-Taylor faced a lot of those biases. When organizations were programming music, simply put, there was not enough interest and energy put into researching, preserving, and performing his music.
Was it also a matter of style? Coleridge-Taylor was writing primarily from this sort of Central European, Germanic style — he came out of the nationalistic Brahms, Dvořák, Grieg mold. I think there are so many fascinating crosscurrents, with a composer who is Afro-British, writing on Native American themes in a more traditionally European, capital “R” Romantic style. Do you think that had something to do with it as well?
I do, in the sense that there was demand for a certain type of music, and not necessarily for others in some ways. The things that you just said about Coleridge-Taylor’s style is what makes Coleridge-Taylor Coleridge-Taylor. It’s what makes his music special, and there was not enough recognition of that in his post-death years.
The way I would say it is: why wasn’t there a more significant demand from an Afro-British composer writing music inspired by indigenous song? You have to go one level deeper. Why was that? And then why was it the case in the 1970s, ‘80s, ‘90s, et cetera. Why today? I think that it’s exciting to see the industry start to have these conversations a little bit more honestly.
The primary motive for recording this album and sharing it wasn’t this, necessarily. It was because we think this music is fantastic. The music itself is fantastic and deserves to be shared and heard. I wish that in the ‘20s and ‘30s and ‘40s, there had been more energy and effort put into preserving his music. Unfortunately that there wasn’t means that today a huge amount of effort needs to be done to resurrect his work.
Let’s talk a little bit more about your new album with the National Philharmonic. What was the genesis of this project for you?
It was 2023, and I was thinking about what I wanted my next recording to be. A huge benefit of recording is that it’s for forever. Performances are great, but recording to me is a different medium. To put together a studio album is a fantastic amount of work. A lot of money has to be raised so, you know, if you’re going to go through all the trouble to do all of that, you have to try to find something that you think is really special that needs to be heard. And so this project came to life for me: half out of love for his music and half frustration that there wasn’t more of it. I knew there was more of it, and I knew that some of it could be discovered. I felt that he deserved a project in 2025 to celebrate his 150th birthday.
I know a tremendous amount of scholarship, by you and others, went into finding and preparing — you used the word “reconstituting” — these scores for performance and recording. This was also the first commercial recording ever made by the National Philharmonic Orchestra. What is the experience of learning and conducting and preparing and introducing previously unrecorded work to an orchestra like?
It’s fun! You feel, even though Coleridge-Taylor has been dead for 120 years, a connection with the music when you are interacting with the primary source materials. And the Orchestra musicians feel exactly the same way. Curtis Stewart said it best: we get to share our interpretation in the hopes that somebody else will come along and do it better. We’re very proud of this product. I can’t tell you how many hours of work before the session went into trying to find errors and fixing them. There is a hyper-collaborative process that goes into it.
And when you say “we,” you were working with Coleridge-Taylor specialists who are musicologists?
Yeah. There was a team. The music came from different sources. The Suite from 24 Negro Melodies was found in the British Library by two Coleridge-Taylor enthusiasts, music scholars by the name of Lionel Harrison and Patrick Meadows. I found their work because I came into touch with a dissertation by Catherine Carr at Durham University. She has an incredible index in that dissertation of all of the music that she was able to find that existed at one point in all kinds of different genres of music.
They were partners on this Coleridge-Taylor project, where they found some of his incredible manuscripts and actually digitized them and created editions that have been sitting around and waiting for somebody to do them. So I got in touch and I said, what were your sources? [Lionel Harrison] said, “Well, my source for the Ballade was from the Library of Congress.” I said, “Oh my gosh, yes, the manuscript is there.” So I asked for his edition and proofread it. I think in the entire thing we found one, maybe two errors, which is incredible. So that was the first thing to go on the album. And then he told me about this Suite that they had found, and it was the same sort of process.
It’s an archaeological endeavor as much as anything. And sounds like a true labor of love and amazing opportunity for discovery.
I think his music should be shared. He’s got an incredible birthday coming up, which means there’s an opportunity to share his music at a time when there will be interest, with the goal of trying to amplify his music as much as one possibly could. That was the impetus.
Do you have plans to continue excavating and championing his work? Is there more on the way?
Yes, I really hope so. It would be incredible to go and try to find more of his work. In fact, I have a flash drive here filled with other goodies that I haven’t yet had time to really dig into. It would be wonderful to find some more of his music, and to try to give it life.
I like to think about these major composer birth anniversaries as opportunities to think about what makes their music relevant today. Why does Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music and legacy matter 150 years after his birth?
Because it’s great music, number one. It has meaning in so many ways, but it is important, I think, in understanding the timeline of music history to not be exclusionary and to understand how orchestration was built over time. You really do a disservice if you ignore what was unquestionably one of the best orchestrators from the turn of the 20th century. We pay so much attention to Ravel, for example, who deserves attention, but Coleridge-Taylor is in that league. It’s important to study him. People will love this music because it’s fun to listen to. It’s enjoyable.
It’s very enjoyable. I totally agree.
And I think that with all that’s going on in the world right now, it’s nice to have enjoyable music as just one small refuge. If you’re coming to Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s music for the very first time, I hope [this album] will be a really great introduction for you and that you’ll have the desire to dig and learn more.
