Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphonic Variations on an African Air


This February, the Daily Classical Music Post celebrates Black composers and musicians whose music has been suppressed and ignored. All of these musicians should be added to the music history and music theory curriculum.

https://youtu.be/EPRNWXsdb90


Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was named for the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Originally, his name was not hyphenated, but apparently a printer inserted one by accident so the composer decided to keep it.


Coleridge-Taylor studied composition at the Royal College of Music, studying with Charles Villiers Stanford. He was a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music and the conductor of the Croydon Conservatoire Orchestra. In his early 20s, he was mentored by Edward Elgar, who referred to Coleridge-Taylor as “far and away the cleverest fellow going amongst the younger men.” Coleridge-Taylor’s music was a great success both in Europe and in the United States. President Theodore Roosevelt welcomed him to the White House in 1904, and performances of his works met with great success. Sadly, because he was not well paid even with all of this success, he struggled financially for most of his short life. He most likely contracted pneumonia as a result of the stress, and he died when he was only 37 years old. There were large crowds at his funeral and all of the newspapers and journals of the day had extensive coverage, but by the middle of the 20th century he was pretty much forgotten.


Coleridge-Taylor believed that just as Brahms did with Hungarian music and Dvořák did with Bohemian music, he should integrate traditional African music into classical music, and he sought to do this in all of his works. In particular, he drew on his Sierra Leone heritage (where his father was from).


Beginning in late 1905, Coleridge-Taylor began work on his Symphonic Variations on an African Air, Op. 63 (completed in 1906). His notes say that the work was based on a song “well known in America under the title ‘I’m Troubled in Mind.’ It is a genuine negro tune which, although hailing from America, so closely resembles an existent African song that the charge of white influence can scarcely be made.”


The theme-and-variation form of composition can be—and often is—pretty unimaginative and too easy to predict what comes next. John L. Snyder says, “The overall construction of [Symphonic Variations on an African Air] is of some interest. . . . [Coleridge-Taylor] employs transitions between variations in many instances, thus blurring the boundaries somewhat. More importantly, he links or interweaves variations so as to obliterate the seams entirely.” This is a work that truly does show the genius of a composer who might very well have altered the course of 20th-century classical music had he not died so young.


My classical music post for today is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphonic Variations on an African Air.

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