Coleridge Taylor wants her music to be more widely recognized. The daughter of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, dubbed the “African Mahler,” claims that the East Sussex landscape served as her inspiration.
Being a woman of color and a composer, according to her family, may have “held her back.”
Her relatives uncovered boxes containing her compositions several years after her 1998 death in Seaford.
After receiving boxes of what she initially thought to be Samuel Coleridge-archived Taylor’s materials as an inheritance, Fiona Dashwood, the late granddaughter of Ms. Coleridge-Taylor, recently learned that the boxes contained her work.
When her music was discovered, Ms. Dashwood claimed that although being well-known in her prime, being a lady of mixed ethnicity probably impeded her.
She didn’t receive the praise she deserved, according to Ms. Dashwood. “As a family, we’d like to see her get more recognition.”
Following the government’s discovery of Ms. Coleridge-African Taylor’s ancestry in 1952, Ms. Dashwood claimed, Ms. Coleridge-Taylor left South Africa under apartheid.
She also used the pseudonym Peter Riley to publish works created in Sussex.
“A fantastic composer”
“She’d had such a bad time, I think Sussex meant an awful lot to her,” Ms. Dashwood continued.
She moved around a little bit, but she stayed in Sussex. She quotes a poem that claims the South Downs, the hills, and the sea provided her with comfort.
Caroline Preece, Ms. Coleridge-granddaughter, Taylor’s says learning about her music has been “an incredible joy.”
She said,
“I don’t think we knew too much about her in the family, not from the world standpoint.
“Everyone is starting to understand what an amazing composer she was. I’m hoping a lot of people will hear her songs.”
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