International African Institute

Africa in the Music of Samuel Coleridge-TaylorAuthor(s): Paul RichardsSource: Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, Vol. 57, No. 4, Sierra Leone,1787-1987 (1987), pp. 566-571Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the International African InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1159901 .

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Africa 57 (4), 1987

AFRICA IN THE MUSIC OF SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR

Paul Richards

The composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was born in London and lived for the greater part of his life in the Croydon area. His father, D. P. H. Taylor, son of a Freetown trader of Yoruba descent, came to London from Sierra Leone to study medicine at King's College. Qualifying in 1874, he took up a position as assistant to a general practitioner, but returned to West Africa in 1879. Most of his subsequent career was spent in private practice in Gambia and he died in 1904.1 Coleridge-Taylor never visited Africa, and connections with his father's birthplace might at first seem tenuous. Sierra Leoneans, however, reckon him as one of their 'sons abroad', a justifiable claim on two counts. First, Coleridge-Taylor had links with the West African world via Sierra Leonean friends in London.2 Second, he frequently and proudly proclaimed his Africanness through his music. It is this second feature to which the present article draws attention.

Four substantial pieces by Coleridge-Taylor include the word 'African' in their titles: African Romances, seven songs with piano accompaniment to words by the Afro-American poet Paul Dunbar (Op. 17, published 1897), African Suite for piano (Op. 35, published 1899), Four African Dances for violin and piano (Op. 58, published 1904), and Symphonic Variations on an African Air for orchestra (Op. 63, published 1906).3 In addition to these four works there are a number of others with explicit African or Afro-American associations. Instances are as follows. The unaccompanied part song Whispers of Summer and the Five Fairy Ballads (for voice and piano, published 1909) are to words by a Sierra Leonean friend, Kathleen Easmon.4 The plot of the 'operatic romance' Dream Lovers (1898), for four soloists and female chorus to words by Paul Dunbar, concerns 'a prince of Madagascar'. Two orchestral pieces invoke Afro-Caribbean allusions: the concert overture Toussaint l'Ouverture (Op. 46, 1901) and the rhapsody The Bamboula (Op. 75, 1911), based on a dance tune of West Indian origin. Finally there are the Twenty-four Negro Melodies for piano (Op. 59), written as an outcome of his first tour of America and published by Oliver Ditson of Boston in 1905.

The Twenty-four Negro Melodies are of especial significance in Coleridge- Taylor's output. Their composer hoped they would do for black music (both African and Afro-American) 'what Brahms had done for the Hungarian folk-music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian'. Coleridge-Taylor saw these pieces as a demonstration of the scope and range of black musicality, and thus, explicitly, as a contribution to the struggle for racial equality. The composer had been particularly inspired by the writings of W. E. B. DuBois, and had also visited Booker T. Washington while in the United States. Washington contributed a substantial preface to the Twenty- four Negro Melodies in which he summarised the composer's career and drew attention to the provenance and significance of the folk melodies on which the work was based.5

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AFRICA IN THE MUSIC OF SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR

In each case the melody (and, where appropriate, words) are printed in small type at the head of each number. Sixteen items in the Op. 59 set are based on melodies of Afro-American origin. Some are simply described as 'Negro American', others are drawn from four published collections (Jubilee Songs, New Jubilee Songs, Jubilee and Plantation Songs and Cabin and Plantation Songs) and include such well known spirituals as 'Deep river' and 'Steal away'. These may have been among songs Coleridge-Taylor first heard in performances by the Jubilee Singers, 'through whom', he notes in his foreword to Op. 59, 'I first learned to appreciate the beautiful folk-music of my race'.

One of the remaining eight items in Op. 59-The Bamboula (African Dance)-is based on a theme of West Indian origin ('from the collection of Henry E. Krehbiel'). The theme and title were used for a later orchestral rhapsody, published as Op. 75. This subsequent piece is almost entirely a new composition, though it makes use of some ideas from the earlier setting (notably the counter-melody in the bass which first appears at bars 17-21 of the piano piece).

Particular interest attaches to the seven items in the Op. 59 collection based on melodies from the African continent.6 Six of these Coleridge-Taylor discovered in an 'excellent and sympathetic little book', Les Chants et les contes des Ba-Ronga de la baie de Delagoa, published in Lausanne (1897) by the Swiss missionary and ethnographer Henri-A. Junod. The book is divided into two parts. The first (pp. 17-66) is a short survey of the music of the region (now in southern Mozambique). The second part (pp. 85-324) is a compilation of Ba-Ronga folk tales, including transcriptions of song themes integral to the performance of these tales. Coleridge-Taylor drew on both sections of the book for thematic material.7

Coleridge-Taylor was obviously especially fascinated by the one West African item in the collection, Oloba, rightly described in his foreword as 'a highly original number'. The material in small type at the head of the page is in two parts: sixteen measures of music and words described as 'a West African folk-lore song' and a four-bar rhythmic motif described as 'a West African drum-call (?) in the author's possession'. The song text is in Yoruba, although one word ('xalo' in bar 12) appears to have been corrupted in transcription and the meaning of another ('etitan') is obscure (perhaps because it is dialect). Karin Barber and Olabiyi Yai, to whom I am indebted for this information, suggest a reconstitution of the text and translation as follows:

Ql0ba yale mi o, Ql1ba (x2) 'Etitan' yii dun j9Qj Q16ba Emi SQ 9 senu 'xalo' QlOba Ilejimi geri Ol1ba, Ql1ba, Ql6ba Oloba, come to my house, Oloba. This etitan is very sweet, Oloba. I'll pop it in my mouth xalo. Oloba Ilejimi is superior [top] Oloba, Oloba, Oloba.

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SHORT COMMUNICATIONS

They speculate that the piece is a praise song. If so, the drum call which Coleridge-Taylor causes to recur four times as a preface to each variant of the main theme might have been intended as an invocation of the 'talking drum' appropriate in such a context. When played with suitable rhythmic flexibility the first statement of the theme perhaps approaches more closely the sound and texture of the original than anything else in the set.

The provenance of Oloba is an interesting question. Coleridge-Taylor cites Mrs Victoria Randall (nee Davies) as its source. Victoria Davies was the eldest daughter of James Davies, a Freetown merchant captain of Aku parentage, and Sally Forbes-Bonetta, brought as a girl from Dahomey, adopted by Queen Victoria, and later educated in Freetown. The Queen stood as godmother to their daughter, subsequently inviting her to Windsor. For some time Victoria Davies lodged in London at a boarding house run by the Smith sisters from Freetown.8 Victoria later married Dr John Randall from Regent, who, after qualifying in medicine at St Andrews, went to practise in Lagos. Clearly, she kept up her links with the composer after her marriage, and may have transcribed the song herself in Lagos. Alternatively the transcription may have been the work of one or other of the Sierra Leonean clergymen working for the CMS Yoruba Mission. A number of them had musical training and a deep interest in their ancestral language and culture.9 A third possibility is that the song originated among the Aku community in Freetown. Conceivably this might account for the dialectal obscurities of the text. It is interesting to speculate whether, in choosing to set this tune, Coleridge-Taylor was consciously invoking his Yoruba ancestry.

This, then, briefly summarises the position with regard to the use of specifically African thematic material in the music of Coleridge-Taylor. But in addition to such specific thematic allusions it is important to realise that Coleridge-Taylor thought of his music as 'African' in a more general expressive sense. His contemporaries saw this in a certain freshness of harmony, boldness of melodic outline and rhythmic and metrical sophistica- tion, well illustrated in two early chamber works-the Fantasiestucke (Op. 5) for string quartet, where the second movement is in 5/4 time and the last movement is an especially lively dance,10 and the quintet (Op. 6) for clarinet and strings, where the rhythmic vigour of the opening pages is an apposite response to his teacher Stanford's injunction 'to keep it clear of Brahms' (whose own clarinet quintet, whatever its merits, must surely be ranked among the least rhythmically bracing works in the chamber music repertoire). l

In one work in particular, however, Coleridge-Taylor's Africanism goes beyond the purely stylistic and technical. This is the Symphonic Variations on an African Air for orchestra, Op. 63. The theme in question is 'I'm troubled in mind', a plantation song which Coleridge-Taylor had already set as No. 14 of the Twenty-four Negro Melodies, having there attached the significant footnote 'one of the most beautiful of negro melodies-it is said that a certain slave used to sing this song with so much pathos that few could listen without weeping from sympathy'. The orchestral variations play for about twenty minutes, and at times generate considerable fire and pathos (as in the march-like allegro molto section in C minor and a quiet keening variation, lento, E minor, where melodic phrases overlap over a sustained pedal A

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AFRICA IN THE MUSIC OF SAMUEL COLERIDGE-TAYLOR

before a middle section in which the theme returns in the bass). There seems little doubt that the variations deserve to be numbered among Coleridge- Taylor's finest and most ambitious pieces, and that they would well merit revival.12 Is it too far-fetched to hear in them a musical reflection upon contemporary concerns in black politics-concerns linking civil rights lead- ers in North America with anti-colonial movements in Africa? Even if Coleridge-Taylor is only tenuously a West African composer, in this piece, perhaps more than any other, he establishes a claim to be considered pan-African.

Coleridge-Taylor's wife, Jessie, records that he was frequently amused by the uncertainty of critics and audiences as to his geographical origins. The question was on his mind during his final illness. Shortly before he died he appears to have definitely settled the matter. 'The critics,' he declared, 'will call me a Creole composer.' Fittingly, there was a West African friend at his bedside when he died, and many others attended his funeral.13 It was equally fitting that his choral masterpiece, Scenes from 'The Song of Hiawatha' (Op. 30) should have been selected for performance in Freetown'4 to celebrate the bicentenary of a community that did so much to redress the bitter legacy of the slave trade by nourishing connections through which members of the black Diaspora might seek their cultural roots.

NOTES

On D. P. H. Taylor see Fyfe (1962). Coleridge-Taylor's mother died in Croydon in 1953. Jeffrey Green and Paul McGilchrist have recently published valuable new information relating to the composer's early life, in part based on interviews with Coleridge-Taylor's half-sister, Marjorie Evans (b. 1896). See Green and McGilchrist (1985, 1986) and Evans (1986). This supplements and clarifies the earlier and at times misleading or incomplete biographical information in Berwick Sayers (1915), J. Coleridge-Taylor (1943) and A. Coleridge-Taylor (1979).

2 Some of these contacts are documented in a recent biographical study of Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford (Cromwell, 1986).

3 The question of opus numbers for the works of Coleridge-Taylor is a somewhat vexed question. J. H. Smither Jackson, in preparing a list for the Berwick Sayers biography, explained that 'owing to the composer's somewhat erratic use of opus numbers, certain blanks still remain'. It seems possible that the composer also made some double allocations. Green and McGilchrist (1986) have turned up a concert programme in which two songs allocated the opus number 21 in Smither Jackson's list are listed as 'Opus 35, Nos. 1 & 2', the same opus number allocated to the African Suite for piano (Augener, 1899).

4 Kathleen Easmon, trained in London as an artist, painted a frontispiece for a specially bound copy of Tales of old Japan (1911) which Coleridge-Taylor had made for his wife's use at the first performance. Jessie Coleridge-Taylor (1943: 51) recalls that 'at the evening's perform- ance [the composer] had made a wager with this young artist that she would not appear dressed as a West African princess; but he lost his bet, and she attracted much attention in her richly coloured and magnificently embroidered draperies' (cf. the striking photograph of Kathleen Easmon Simango reproduced in Cromwell, 1986).

5 This and the composer's foreword are reprinted in A. Coleridge-Taylor (1979). 6 So far I have found only one other possible instance in which Coleridge-Taylor uses African

(as distinct from an Afro-American) thematic material. A note in the piano part of the second movement of the Four African Dances (Op. 58) states that the main theme of the movement is 'from a traditional African melody'. No source is cited. It is not to be found in the Junod collection. Since Coleridge-Taylor often uses the term 'African' in the broadest sense to include Afro-American and Afro-Caribbean material it cannot be assumed that this charming tune originated in Africa without firmer evidence concerning its provenance.

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7 Nos. 1, 2, 4 and 6 are based on Junod's musical illustrations at pp. 59, 26, 39 and 32 respectively. The themes for Nos. 3 and 5 are to be found at pp. 249 and 225. Perhaps overfaced by having to explain the context (a story about toads), the composer gives No. 3 the otherwise incomprehensible title 'Take Nabandji'. Op. 59 No. 6 carries the following footnote: 'the subject is certainly not unworthy of any composer-from Beethoven downwards. It is at once simple, strong and noble, and probably stands higher than any other example of purely "savage" music in these respects.' Despite this endorsement, Coleridge-Taylor chose to alter the rhythm slightly in bars 2 and 4. Alterations elsewhere include transposing Junod's melody for No. 4 from C to D. Some of Junod's texts suffer corruption in transcription (e.g. in No. 1 the click phoneme 'qa' becomes 'ga', and in No. 4 'Ngi'nta ku u-tla!' becomes 'Ngi-nba ku u-Ha!').

8 It was through Victoria Davies that the Smiths and Nettie (Smith) Easmon's daughter, Kathleen, first met the Coleridge-Taylors (Cromwell, 1986). 9 For background to the musical interests and attainments of Saro (Sierra Leonean) churchmen in Lagos see Echeruo (1976). 10 Kofi Agawu points out that time signatures with five beats to the bar are uncommon in West African music, but for one such example see Richards (1972).

11 Typical of such critical comment is the notice of Coleridge-Taylor in the Musical Times prior to the first performance of the orchestral Ballade in A minor at the Gloucester Three Choirs Festival in September 1898 (reproduced in Green and McGilchrist, 1986), which refers to his quick movements as being 'full of tremendous vigour, strange rhythms, and a wild untrammel- led gaiety suggestive of neither European nor Oriental influence'. The five Fantasiestucke for string quartet may have been among the pieces the writer had in mind. These were included in Coleridge-Taylor's contribution to a joint recital given with Paul Dunbar in the Salle Erard in Great Marlborough Street, one of the young composer's first 'African' ventures. The composer's daughter records that the original version (for piano and string quartet) of the Danse Negre, subsequently incorporated as the last movement of the African Suite, Op. 35, 'bears a quotation [from Dunbar] between the staves' (A. Coleridge-Taylor, 1979: 27).

12 I ought to qualify this judgement by noting that it is based solely on reading through the composer's own piano reduction of the Variations. I have not yet seen the full score, nor have I examined the score of his early symphony (Op. 7). The composer's daughter, however, draws particular attention to the effectiveness of the orchestration of the Variations (A. Coleridge- Taylor, 1979: 73).

13 The friend is not identified in Jessie Coleridge-Taylor's memoir (1943). Reports of the funeral mention over two dozen West Africans in attendance (Jeffrey Green, personal communication).

14 I am grateful to Vera Viditz-Ward for a first-hand report.

REFERENCES

Berwick Sayers, W. C. 1915. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: his life and letters. London. Coleridge-Taylor, Avril. 1979. The Heritage of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. London:

Dobson. Coleridge-Taylor, Jessie F. 1943. Genius and Musician (full title A Memory Sketch or

Personal Reminiscences of my Husband, Genius and Musician, S. Coleridge-Taylor, 1875-1912) (privately printed).

Cromwell, Adelaide M. 1986. An African Feminist: the life and times of Adelaide Smith Casely Hayford, 1868-1960. London: Cass.

Echeruo, E. 1976. Victorian Lagos. London: Macmillan. Evans, M. 1986. 'I remember Coleridge: recollections of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

(1875-1912)', in Under the Imperial Carpet: essays in black history, 1780-1950, eds. R. Lotz and I. Pegg. Crawley: Rabbit Press.

Fyfe, Christopher. 1962. A History of Sierra Leone. London: Oxford University Press. Green, Jeffrey, and Paul McGilchrist. 1985. 'Some recent findings on Samuel

Coleridge-Taylor', The Black Perspective in Music, 13, 2: 151-78. Green, Jeffrey, and Paul McGilchrist. 1986. 'Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: a postscript',

The Black Perspective in Music, 14, 3: 259-66.

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Junod, Henri-A. 1897. Les Chants et les contes des Ba-Ronga de la baie de Delagoa. Lausanne: Bridel.

Richards, P. 1972. 'A quantitative analysis of the relationship between language tone and melody in a Hausa song', African Language Studies, 13: 137-61.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

I would like to thank Kofi Agawu, Karin Barber, Christopher Fyfe, Jeffrey Green and Olabiyi Yai for their advice and assistance in preparing this article.

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