by Caiti Beth McKinney
Hi Horn Friends!
For this month’s Europe issue of Horn and More, I want to share the music of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor with you. Although only one of his chamber pieces features the horn, Coleridge-Taylor’s Nonet in F Minor is a substantial and invaluable addition to any chamber musician’s repertoire, and his orchestral oeuvre is not to be missed!
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, named after the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was born in London in 1875 during the height of the Victorian Era to parents Daniel Peter Hughes Taylor, a doctor from the African country of Sierra Leone, and Alice Hare Martin, an Englishwoman. It is unlikely that Samuel ever met his father, who returned to Sierra Leone that same year, leaving the future composer to be raised by his mother alone. She was able to provide him with violin lessons from a local instructor from a young age, and in 1890 the musician entered the Royal College of Music in London. His talents were prodigious enough to catch the eye of a silk merchant, Herbert Walters, who would become Coleridge-Taylor’s patron and sponsor, paying for his education.
Coleridge-Taylor’s mixed-race ancestry had a profound impact on his life and career. During his daily commute to school, Samuel was forced to endure comments about his appearance and color, and insults and slurs would continue to follow him his whole life. Even supposedly well-meaning titles bestowed by fans were laden with problematic racialized terminology; for example, after a successful tour of the United States in the early 1900s, American musicians took to calling Coleridge-Taylor “the African Mahler.”
Despite both outright and microaggressions, Coleridge-Taylor’s music was widely celebrated during his lifetime, particularly his orchestral repertoire, including such pieces as Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898), which he would later expand into a cantata trilogy entitled The Song of Hiawatha. The composer’s successes were so far-reaching that he was even received at the White House by President Theodore Roosevelt, and his music was championed by Edward Elgar. Coleridge-Taylor’s compositions frequently incorporated elements and melodies pulled from African music, Negro Spirituals, as well as British, Irish, and other cultural folk tunes, pulling together parts of his identities into a seamless whole.
The Nonet in F Minor, Op. 2 (1893), written while he was teenager and student at the Royal College, is one of Coleridge-Taylor’s earliest published works but is, nonetheless, a work of art. Full of lush melodic lines, contrapuntal interplay, and beautiful use of textural colors, this piece is an underappreciated gem. Enjoy!
