Posthumous Christmas : Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Christmas Overture is "posthumous", in the sense that the present form in which it's known was made thirteen years after the composer’s death by a popular arranger, Sydney Barnes.  Colerdge-Taylor's original music was more extensive, being incidental music for a children's play, The Forest of Wild Thyme, in 1910.  There must be dozens of Christmas compilations but this is robust and rather jolly. One wonders what remains of the original manuscript. There's a good recording by the BBC Concert Orchestra conducted by Barry Wordsworth.

While still a student at the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor came to the attention of August Jaeger and Edward Elgar who arranged a commission for him at the 1897 Three Choirs Festival.    Hiawatha's Wedding Feast followed soon after, then the full Song of Hiawatha. By the age of 25, Coleridge-Taylor was a resounding success.   Hiawatha was a hit because it suited the taste of the time for grand excess, but it's actually a more more sophisticated work than its reputation might suggest.  Even in Hiawatha, Coleridge-Taylor experiments with non-western form, following Longfellow's attempts to recreate Native American chant and the use of exotc speech rhythm. 

Although he never knew his father and was brought up in an entirely English  environment, being half Black might have shaped his sense of identity, though his interest in the possibilities of "new world" music might also have been sparked by Dvořák and German and French composers of the era. Imagine if he had lived to know Ravel or Starvinsky, or to experience the Jazz Age and the innovations of the 1920's!  Understanding Coleridge-Taylor means understanding the social context in which he was operating, and very specifically the black and non-western culture  of his time.  

Thus I cannot recommend highly enough the book Samuel Coleridge -Taylor: a Musical Life by Jeffrey Green (Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 296pp). This is the kind of proper examination that Coleridge-Taylor deserves. Green is a meticulous researcher, with an encylopedic knowledge of Black society in Britain in Coleridge-Taylor's time.  Green's research is meticulous, drawing on sources rarely explored, and is presented with intelligent analysis. It's absolutely essential for anyone interested in multi-cultural Britain. But he's also superb on the social context of Victorian  and Edwardian Britain: a lesson for anyone really interested in knowing what life might have been like in crowded terrace houses and large extended families. Indeed, anyone interested in modern Britain needs to know Green's work.  

The first books on Coleridge-Taylor were written in the early years of the 20th century, before most could even conceive the subtleties of race and class politics. Thus the early books were a sanitized mix of myth and wishful thinking.  The tag "The Black Mahler" for example which has nothing to do with Coleridge-Taylor as a man and his music. It was coined in reference to Coleridge-Taylor’s celebrity when he arrived  in the United States, the reference being to the celebrity as a conductor accorded to Mahler when he visited America in the same period.  Nowadays anything with the word "Mahler" in it sells, so the temptation is to exploit the term for money value even though it's highly misleading.

Black in Britain - musicians and stereotypes

Good article "From slavery to singing star: celebrating Thomas Rutling, by Ronald Samm, who is a singer himself. Samm is starring in a piece on Rutling's life at Harrogate, where Rutling settled down. Samm was also one of the security guards in Tansy Davies' much misunderstood  Between Worlds  at the ENO. What must it have been like to be black in Britain in late Victorian times when any kind of non-white person was an exotic alien?  Rutling is seated above, middle row left. In his tux he could pass for a banker or a patron of the Royal Opera House. But look at the banjo and guitar in the foreground. The Fisk Jubilee Singers were admired but they still had to conform to stereotypes. No way was the public ready for blacks  as equals in "serious" music.

Rutling (1854-1915) was a contemporary of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), whose blackness was an accident of birth, and who grew up in an all-white environment, admired by Elgar and feted at the Three Choirs Festival. To Coleridge-Taylor's credit, he set out to learn about black identity, writing music influenced by generic "African" ideas and Black American music. Being a proper English gentleman meant he was received by the President of the United States. Ordinary black Americans  didn't get invited to the White House except as menials.  To Coleridge-Taylor's credit, he went out of his way to learn about black culture and meet black American artists and intellectuals, Coleridge-Taylor's music is possibly better known in the US today than in Britain. Read my article "Who really was Coleridge-Taylor ?" HERE, and my other pieces on him by clicking the label below.

Coleridge-Taylor's music is fascinating because he was genuinely trying to come to terms with non-white western aesthetics, much in the way that French composers from Bizet on explored exotic themes. Imagine if he'd worked with Ravel and developed a whole new musical language?  But he's also important as a perspective on race in late colonial times. Jeffrey Green's biography Samuel Coleridge-Taylor:: a Musical, Life is  essential reading. It's based on exhaustive first-hand research, presented with genuine knowledge of background and the composer's position in society. Even now, black people are exploited for novelty value, an approach which is fundamentally racist even if it's not intentional.  Jeffrey Green's sensitive book gives Coleridge-Taylor the dignity and respect he deserves.

William Grant Still (1895-1978) grew up in a black community in the South, so his experiences of black identity were more acute than Coleridge-Taylor's, and very different indeed to the prettified fantasy of Delius's Koanga. Grant Still was middle class and educated, but had to adapt to a certain amount of stereotype to make a living.  Fortunately, he lived long enough to be recognized as a musician and part of the Harlem Renaissance.

Back to Ronald Samm and his ideas on the role of black singers today. If this really was an equal world, the issue wouldn't arise, but the fact is, the number of black people in classical music doesn't reflect demographic reality.  Like it or not, classical music is perceived as being elitist. The myth reinforces prejudice, intensifying the problem.  One of the stupidest things in current arts policy is the idea that music can somehow change society, but in reality, unless society itself changes, we aren't going to get more blacks on stage and in the audience. Non-white people get patronized all the time. More talking down doesn't help. Besides, being non-white can sometimes be an artistic advantage. Last year, Eva-Maria Westbroek sang Puccini Manon Lescaut.  Westbroek's lush blonde voluptuousness was nicely set off by Lester Lynch as her brother. In a sense having a black guy as lowlife feeds stereotype, but the dynamic between Westbroek and Lynch was electric. Brother and sister, enthusiastic parters in crime, enjoying every moment.

Who really was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ? Hiawatha BBC

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's complete Song of Hiawatha from this year's Three Choirs Festival in Gloucester is available on BBC iplayer for six more days. I was at the performance, on one of the hottest days of the year, but as ever The Three Choirs Festival people were gracious, and let us take shelter in the cool of the Cathedral, though they themselves may have been melting in their three-piece frock coats. True Christian values!  Please read my review HERE.

Hiawatha is an important piece in music history, and not just British music. Dvorák's Symphony from the New World preceded Hiawatha's Wedding Feast by only five years. Delius had started composing in Florida but hadn't yet made his mark, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, older than Coleridge-Taylor, had yet to work with Ravel. At the age of 23, Coleridge-Taylor was already striking away from Charles Stanford's insular world.  Hiawatha is not so much a throwback to tradition but a rebirth. Stylistically, it's innovative, with angular, repetitive lines that suggest "primitive" music, following Longfellow's syntax which suggests the speech rhythms of an oral tradition. Perhaps Coleridge-Taylor was drawn to African and other alien forms because he never knew his father. But it's even more important that he was among the first to intuit the direction in which European music and culture was heading. Picasso, for example, loved African art, but Coleridge-Taylor was well on the way, years before.

So why has Coleridge-Taylor been neglected?  Far from being appreciated as a man and as a musician, he's been pigeonholed into stereotypes, many of which are totally misleading. If even the BBC doesn't care enough to research the background properly, what hope is there? In the early 20th century, there were reasons why the image of Coleridge-Taylor should be transmuted into silly, sentimental bluff.  The "Black Mahler" tag is musically illiterate: we should be thinking past puff like that.  If we have any respect for the composer at all, or indeed for music, we need to be mature enough to handle genuine scholarship and analysis.

Thus I thoroughly recommend Samuel Coleridge -Taylor: a Musical Life by Jeffrey Green (Pickering & Chatto, 2011, 296pp). This is the kind of proper examination that Coleridge-Taylor deserves. Green is a meticulous researcher.  There's no need for fantasy when there is such a wealth of factual information readily available in many archives. Green's decades of work on Black Britons is unique, and absolutely essential for anyone interested in multi-cultural Britain. But he's also superb on the social context of Victorian  and Edwardian Britain: a lesson for anyone really interested in knowing what life might have been like in crowded terrace houses and large extended families.

But most importantly of all, what emerges from Jeffrey Green's book is a full and vivid portrait of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor himself.  Because there's so much genuine information about the composer, his music and the world he lived in, there is no need for fantasy. We have enough here that we can "feel" what Coleridge-Taylor might have been like, and understand him as a human being. There's even a record of a black child in an orphanage opposite the composer's childhood home. Never underestimate the value of good research and methodology.

The first books written about Coleridge-Taylor skirted around the truth to fit the expectations of the time. The myth about the composer getting a violin from a Curiosity Shop dealer is easily debunked. Coleridge-Taylor's grandfather was a remarkable character who played the violin himself, and whose relatives were musicians. By the standard of working-class Britain, he was very comfortably off, owning two houses and paying poll tax. He adored his grandson so much that there's no way that the boy would have been deprived. But his daughter was illegitimate. In an unusual arrangement, the child grew up with her natural father, his wife and the other children in the family. So for public consumption, the situation, and the relationship between the composer's parents, had to be discreetly underplayed.  In real life, the composer's father was feckless, but had to be romanticized to fit what white middle class people considered acceptable in blacks. Green tackles difficult issues of racial prejudice in the United States where Coleridge-Taylor was feted but coloured people were excluded. The composer was no fool, he knew what was going on. Even in Hiawatha, we can feel his sympathies for the oppressed. Green is, naturally, especially good on Coleridge-Taylor's relationship with American Black intellectuals.

And as for the idea that The Song of Hiawatha should be revived with audiences dressed up as Red Indians?  That  might have been cute once, but now we know that the "Indians" were ethnically cleansed on an epic scale, such behaviour would be racially offensive. Does the BBC really want that in modern Britain where all classes and colours should mix?  This is the very sort of thing that demeans Coleridge-Taylor's reputation and leaves him open to uninformed criticism. Here we have one of the most fascinating British composers but does anyone care?  I have no connection to Jeffrey Green, It's just that I believe in getting to the truth..

PS Get the recording of Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha with Bryn Terfel, Kenneth Alwyn conducts.

Coleridge-Taylor Hiawatha Three Choirs Festival

The Song of Hiawatha, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor at Gloucester Cathedral, highlight of this year's Three Choirs Festival. The Three Choirs Festival is the world's oldest music festival.  For over three hundred years, the choirs of the cathedrals of Gloucester, Hereford and Worcester have been coming together to sing. In many ways, British music was defined by the Three Choirs Festival well into the mid 20th century: it is the epicentre of a grand tradition. Hearing Coleridge-Taylor's Hiawatha here was significant, because the Festival was instrumental in bringing the composer to prominence. While still a student, Coleridge-Taylor came to the attention of August Jaeger and Edward Elgar. The Three Choirs Festival gave him his first big commission in 1897.  Hiawatha's Wedding Feast followed soon after, then the full Song of Hiawatha. By the age of 25, Coleridge-Taylor was a resounding success.

Coleridge-Taylor is sometimes called "The Black Mahler" but it's a silly marketing gimmick. It's musically illiterate. Coleridge-Taylor didn't conduct opera and didn't write symphonies. The Song of Hiawatha sits firmly in the oratorio tradition. If anything, Coleridge-Taylor was the "Black Elgar". The Three Choirs Chorus sang with such fervour that the Elgarian aspects of the score shone with great conviction, even if the words were a little indistinct.  But what joy it must have been for them to tackle this strange, almost hypnotic chant, and words like Pau-puk-Keewis, Chibiabos, Shaugodaya, Kuntassoo and Iagoo! Hiawatha is a Grand Sing and needs to be done on this grand scale.

The soloists stand forth from the chorus. Twenty years ago, Bryn Terfel sang the baritone part for the Orchestra of the Welsh National Opera, under William Alwyn. He was brilliant, defining the whole piece with his presence, all the more striking because he sounded so young, No-one could compare, though Benedict Nelson did his best. Robin Tritschler sang the tenor part, negotiating the cruelly high cry "Awake ! my beloved" with ease. Hye-Youn Lee sang the soprano part with exceptional freshness and vitality. She's a singer we should be hearing a lot more of.

Orchestrally, The Song of Hiawatha is rousing. London's Philharmonia Orchestra played for Peter Nardone as if they were playing grand opera. The horn call that introduces the piece and runs throughout suggested Wagner. Both Siegfried and Hiawatha are Noble Savages, setting out on voyages of discovery. The pounding timpani, however, suggest the type of drums white people assumed Red Indians would play. They also anchor the orchestra in a way percussion would not perhaps control symphonic form for many years to come. The Song of Hiawatha is oratorio, but also influenced by new European influences. Englishmen didn't really write opera until Britten's Peter Grimes in 1948.The Philharmonia were much livelier and more vivid than the WNO Orchestra on the recording.

Although Hiawatha hands his people over to missionaries to be civilized, it doesn't sit well with the pious religious values of its time. Even Elgar's Dream of Gerontius, completed two years after Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, was considered racy in many circles because of its Catholic connections. But Hiawatha is important, not just for its exotic subject. Coleridge-Taylor may have chosen Longfellow's text because of its unique syntax, imitating the repetitive chant of oral traditions. "By the shores of Gitchee Gumee, by the shining Big Sea Water". Even the stange names come over like incantation. For a musician, this syntax translates into musical form. Coleridge-Taylor adapts the syntax into short rhythmic cells. Coleridge-Taylor is experimenting, tentatively, with new form. How he would have responded to Stravinsky, to Picasso, to Diaghilev and to Ravel!

There are lyrical passages in Hiawatha that evoke the freshness and wonder of Dvorák's Symphony From the New World, written only five years before, and definitely "new" music. Yet Coleridge-Taylor's style is distinctively his own.  At this stage, Vaughan Williams, though slightly older, was still under the thumb of Charles Villiers Stanford and Delius was yet to find himself. Unlike, say, Granville Bantock, whose exoticism operated like fancy dress costume, Coleridge-Taylor absorbed alien ideas into his very artistic core. He listened to Black American music and adapted it to create something original. Years later Bartók would turn to Hungarian folk music to create new music, but Coleridge-Taylor was well on the way earlier. Perhaps he was attracted to Black music as a kind of atavistic quest for identity, since he never knew his father. But every time he looked in the mirror, he must have been reminded  that part of who he was remained a mystery. Vaughan Williams's later discovery of English folk song seems very tame in comparison.

When Coleridge-Taylor collapsed on West Croydon railway station, dying a few days later aged only 37, British music lost a true original, perhaps, even, its greatest hope after Elgar. He should not be judged by the colour of his skin, but it's an inescapable part of what he means to us today in multicultural Britain. He's probably also influential in the United States where he was welcomed into the White House by the President, at a time when blacks entered only by the back door. When Coleridge-Taylor was born in 1875, being illegitimate was scandalous. Even though he wasn't "deprived", and there weren't enough Black people around for prejudice to develop beyond curiosity, Coleridge-Taylor would have had to live with other people's stereotypes, however veiled. So I hope we'll be able to get away from the Brittish music ghetto and the "Black Mahler" cliché and respect Coleridge-Taylor in a wider music and social history context.

Please see my piece "Who was Samuel Coleridge-Taylor" which describes Jeffrey Green's well written and well researched biography of the composer. "what emerges from Jeffrey Green's book is a full and vivid portrait of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor himself.  Because there's so much genuine information about the composer, his music and the world he lived in, there is no need for fantasy. We have enough here that we can "feel" what Coleridge-Taylor might have been like, and understand him as a human being." The book is not cheap but is the essential authority. 

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor "Motherless child"

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's The Song of Hiawatha gets a keynote performance at this year's Three Choirs Festival, which gave him his first major commission: the Ballade in A minor for full orchestra, first heard in Gloucester.  It was his op 33, though he was only 23 years old

Like Antonin Dvořák and Frederick Delius, Coleridge-Taylor travelled to America and was fascinated by the "new" world. He was feted by the President Theodore Roosevelt. Although Coleridge-Taylor was an Englishman culturally, in some parts of the US he would have been considered "a coloured man".  While Vaughan Williams and Butterworth were collecting British folk songs, Coleridge-Taylor was listening to the folk songs of alien cultures. Below, one of his Five Negro Melodies op 59 (1905) to the old spiritual: 

Three Choirs Festival Gloucester 2013

What other music Festival can claim a 300-year history? This year marks the 286th Three Choirs Festival, an event central to British music .It's also much more than a music festival. Some people have been regulars for well over 70 years! When the Festival is held in Hereford and Worcester, it's worth booking for a week to enjoy the community dinners, talks and  Shakespeare plays. This year the Festival takes place in Gloucester, just off the M4 from London, and easily reached by train.The Festival Choir is made up of the finest singers from the choirs of all three cathedrals connected to the Festival. In fact, the choirs are its raison d'être, so make a point of listening to at least one of the big choral programmes, even though there's plenty else going on. 

The Three Choirs Festival never loses focus from its original aim, and always starts with an Opening Service and a good choice of music. There's a full Eucharist on Sunday, and a Choral Evensong is usually broadcast by the BBC. The evening Gala on 27/7, however, features Elgar, Rachmaninov and Sibelius. Vladimir Ashkenazy conducts London's Philharmonia Orchestra on Saturday 27th July. Helena Juntunen, the Finnish soprano, sings Sibelius Luonnotar. This could be amazing in the acoustic of Gloucester Cathedral, because the voice part soars and expands outwards. Luonnotar is the spirit of Nature, reaching out across the oceans and the universe, defying cataclysm and time itself. Attend the pre-concert talk and read my article "Luonnotar : Creating the Universe" here. The highlight of the evening, though, will be Rachmaninov's The Bells. Juntunen will be joined by Paul Nilon and Nathan Berg, but the real stars should be the vast mixed voices of the Festival Choir. Imagine hearing the "bells" in the symphony and remembering the bells of the Cathedral and churches around it!

Christmas in July?  On the afternoon of 30/7 there will be an unusual Handel Messiah. The acclaimed early music ensemble, the Dunedin Consort,  will be performing with a good specialist cast led by Rosemary Joshua. Hearing the Festival Chorus in this will be special, for they sing the "story" every Sunday of their lives.  Elgar is another mainstay of the Three Choirs Festival, and The Dream of Gerontius features frequently. This year's Dream will be good, with Kai Rüütel singing the Angel. She was a member of thge Royal Opera House's Young Artist's programme and has presence. She was a distinctive Flora in La Traviata and a good Rhinemaiden in the ROH Ring. She's singing with Toby Spence, who has his own miracle to be glad of, and Matthew Rose. There is also a n Elgar rarity, Falstaff, a four part symphonic studyb that loosely follows Shakespeare's play. A pre concert talk will give its background.

There will also be many recitals, including Wayne Marshall, Philip Lancaster, Andrew Kennedy and Roderick Williams, who is doing a particularly intriguing and probably unique programme. Interesting repertoire, too: Paul Hindemith's Das Marienleben in English, with a pre-performance talk. Read more about Das Marienleben here.

The Three Choirs Festival also showcases important large-scale British works that aren't often performed because the forces they require aren't easy to put together. This year's rarity is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's complete The Song of Hiawatha, a major multi-section work for large choir and orchestra. The Three Choirs Festival has a special connection with Coleridge-Taylor, since the Festival gave him his first major public performances, on the recommendation of Edward Elgar, no less. (For more on Coleridge-Taylor's life, see these British Library pages.)

In its time, The Song of Hiawatha was a big success, feeding the public appetite for extravagant exotica.  Coleridge-Taylor might have been drawn to Hiawatha because of Longfellow's odd, vaguely "primitive" rhythms and repetitive phrasing. They suggested a way in which non-white traditions might be incorporated into western classical culture. Coleridge-Taylor's father was mixed-race African, although he grew up as an Englishman and had little contact with "native" culture, but he was perceptive enough to pick up on the possibilities. The Song of Hiawatha was completed fifteen years before Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. By the time The Rite of Spring was premiered, Coleridge-Taylor had been dead for a year. Coleridge-Taylor wasn't nearly as radical as Stravinsky, but we should consider him in context.  He was born 4 months after Maurice Ravel. Ravel mined his Basque heritage to experiment with new approaches to music. Yet The Song of Hiawatha was written in 1898, long before Ravel found his voice. This very important performance is being broadcast by BBC Radio 3 later in the year, but it will be such a special occasion that it really should be experienced live.

photo :  Andy Dolman