Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Pt 2
Mike Phillips, the Guyana-born British writer, has curated an online exhibition for the British Library on Black Europeans. In his introduction Phillips says:
Popular versions of history have all too often airbrushed out the contribution of non-Europeans to Western arts and sciences. In recent years, scholars have begun to challenge the idea that race or ethnicity is a barrier which can stop individuals from participating in any culture they choose. This has encouraged a new drive to explore and understand the hidden or ignored contribution of people of African descent to the mainstream of European culture and society.
The figures featured in Black Europeans – Alexander Pushkin, Alexandre Dumas, George Polgreen Bridgetower, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and John Archer – all have a mixed European and African ancestry. Although they were fully conscious of their mixed backgrounds, they also regarded themselves as part of a European nation and thought of their work as a contribution to their own sector of the culture of Europe and the world. And they were all figures whose public image and whose activities have been generally accepted (both by their contemporaries and by later generations) to be an important part of Europe’s cultural heritage – to the point where most people ignore, or have forgotten about, the ‘black’ element of their identity and its significance in their lives and work.
As we’ve seen in Part 1, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s upbringing and education were entirely British, and much of his work, especially his cantatas, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast and its sequels, rapidly became part of mainstream British culture. However – as Phillips’ excellent well-illustrated essay on Coleridge-Taylor makes clear - he became interested in incorporating what he saw as African and African American music into compositions. From 1898 when he started to encounter the work of black writers, including the US poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, Coleridge-Taylor, following Dvorak’s example, sought out folk melodies, from Africa, the Caribbean, but especially from US slave-songs or “spirituals.” He incorporated these into various compositions, culminating in his 24 Negro Songs, piano pieces, themes with variations, dated 1905, but probably completed during his first tour to the United States in 1904. In the introduction he wrote: “What Brahms has done for the Hungarian folk music, Dvorak for the Bohemian, and Grieg for the Norwegian, I have tried to do for these Negro melodies”
This tour, the first of three, was a great success. Hiawatha had been performed in the US as early as 1898, and a black choir, named the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Choral Society, was formed in Washington DC in 1901. He conducted choirs and orchestras in various places on the East coast, playing to both black and white audiences. Black audiences and performers, living in a segregated society, were amazed by Coleridge-Taylor’s freedom, as a black man in a white society, and proud of what he had achieved. He made further tours to the States in 1906 and 1910. The photograph at the top of this piece is of the Samuel Coleridge-Taylor Society concert in 1906. Coleridge-Taylor is at the front (with folded arms). The chorus is composed of black singers, and other musicians on stage are both black and white, surprising to see in this formal photograph from that period. On his 2010 visit he worked with the white violinist, Maud Powell on the premiere of his violin concerto. This lovely piece, neglected for many years, has had several recent recordings with versions by Tamsin Little and Lorraine McAslan.
The documentary Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his Music in America 1900-1912 (2013) by Charles Kaufman, Artistic Director of the Longfellow Chorus, is well worth watching. It’s based on a conference of historians and musicologists held in 2012, with copious musical illustrations and original photographs. The Longfellow Chorus, Washington, a choir of African American singers, sing excerpts from Hiawatha throughout the film. Try to watch the section (with 1905 recording) on Maud Powell’s transcription for violin and piano of ‘Deep River’ from the 24 Negro Songs.
Coleridge-Taylor then is by no means forgotten, as the many online resources testify. (Available recordings online today include three of the violin concertos and eight others.) Yet his musical compositions have largely become a historical curiosity, in the UK at least. There are reasons for this. Firstly, like other British musicians of the late 19th and early 20th century, for example Percy Grainger and Edward German, his music has become regarded as too facile, too ‘popular’ and old-fashioned. Tastes change, but maybe we need to expand our ideas about what kind of music is worth listening to. In a New Yorker article of 2018 on the re-discovery of African American composer Florence Price, music critic Alex Ross quotes a correspondent, Anne Schreffler, on the subject of musical greatness:
“Instead of telling students it’s Great, you can say it’s worth their while: historically fascinating, well crafted, genre bending, or just listen-to-this-amazing-moment-at-the-end.”
Ross concludes:
“We need to be open to the bewildering richness of everything that has been written during the past thousand years. To reduce music history to a pageant of masters is, at bottom, lazy. We stick with the known in order to avoid the hard work of exploring the unknown.”
Secondly, despite Coleridge-Taylor’s interest in African American spirituals, he was largely unaware of the development of the black musical forms which have dominated twentieth century music. When on his first visit to the States a white reporter asked him what he thought of ‘coon songs’, he was very dismissive. He died in 1912 before the major impact of ragtime and jazz had been felt on ‘serious’ music. So although his stature as a black musician has made him an important figure in black history, and he has been credited through his 24 Negro Songs with making the US middle classes aware of music previously dismissed as ‘field-songs’, the impact of his music on later black musicians has been negligible.
The third reason for the neglect of his music is more complicated. In 1855, Longfellow wrote the Song of Hiawatha to highlight the plight and the culture of Native Americans – and in early reviews he was much criticised for daring to support hostile savages! At the end of the century with the work popular throughout the world – Dvorak read it in Czech translation and said it influenced his New World Symphony – Coleridge-Taylor, the descendent of African-American slaves, realised that through this text, he could show fellow feeling with other oppressed American peoples of colour. Nowadays with a fuller knowledge of history and more Native Americans writing about their own culture, we are well aware of the shortcomings in Longfellow’s poem, and the three sections of it chosen by Coleridge-Taylor. But I don’t think we should therefore ignore the work for this reason or be so embarrassed as to regard the piece as unfit for performance. “It’s a pity,” Howard Goodall says in his otherwise excellent Real Lives radio broadcast in 2005, “that he didn’t write it in Italian!”
My early experience of singing Hiawatha biases me in its favour, but I believe it deserves to be treated as a serious composition, which shows interesting developments in music and ideas through its three sections. The Wedding Feast is an almost entirely choral communal celebration, with the participants sharing opinions on the skill of the dancer, the beauty of the singer’s voice and the ludicrous boasting of the storyteller. It’s also implicitly marks a compact between neighbouring peoples because Hiawatha, a peacemaker, has made a point of taking his bride from another tribe.
The main motif in the music is simple – an eight-note sequence on the tonic and upper and lower dominant of a major scale (C C G lower G C C G G). The repeated note at the end of a line, often accompanied by timpani provides the distinctive Hiawatha sound. The orchestral accompaniment is elaborate and exciting. The link to the Malcolm Sargent recording with score is worth watching even if you haven’t looked at a score for a while! The middle section, with harps and high woodwind for the choral introduction to the wedding singer, Chibiabos, and the tenor solo, provides a complete contrast to the drums and brass of the first section.
‘The Death of Minnehaha’ is a more sombre piece. It and the last of the trilogy, ‘Hiawatha’s Departure’, both feature atmospheric descriptions of scenery and weather. We draw back from the close-knit community to look at its environment. It’s a harsh winter, causing famine, and also a smallpox epidemic “the fever” – a regular hazard for Native Americans in the north-eastern US States and Canada. It’s gloomy certainly but the music is beautiful. The soprano soloist sings Minnehaha and the baritone Hiawatha, although Nokomis, the wise old woman is also sung by the soprano, but sometimes by the female chorus. The finale for baritone and chorus ‘Farewell Minnehaha’ is a lovely melody – chosen by Bryn Terfel as one of his Desert Island Discs.
Parts one and two take just over an hour, while the third part lasts 50 minutes. It’s fair to say that its theme is hardest to take by modern audiences. Hiawatha believes he should extend the hand of friendship to the white missionaries, ‘the black-robed priests’. Historically the Jesuits, mostly French, undertook missionary activity from the sixteenth century among Native Americans. Although the period of the fictional Hiawatha is unclear, the seventeenth century saw mass conversions after small-pox epidemics. Hiawatha foresees the break-up of his tribe and sees Christianity as a hope for the future. Longfellow and Coleridge-Taylor, as Christians, would see nothing wrong in Hiawatha, the peacemaker, attempting this reconciliation. And yet. In Kaufman’s film, Wayne Shirley, Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress says, “It’s devastating to hear Hiawatha’s final solo about trusting the white man. We want to say, ‘No, don’t listen to him.’”
This third section takes up and expands musical themes and motifs from all three parts. It has solos for soprano, tenor and baritone, sometimes for descriptive passages, sometimes as the voice of a character. Musically the three sections of the cantata work together and deserve a hearing.
Here then is a modest proposal for the EIF 2021. A Samuel Coleridge-Taylor celebration of the work of Britain’s best-known black classical composer. Invite academics and performers from the UK and the US to take part in a public seminar or series of talks about the man and his music. It could feature performances of the violin concerto, and chamber works, including piano pieces and transcriptions of the Negro Songs. But at the centre should be a performance for full choir and orchestra of the three parts of Hiawatha. Over to you, Mr Linehan!
Further information:
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and his Music in America 1900-1912 documentary. There are useful links to sections and musicals excerpts.
Alex Ross’s article on Florence Price, African American composer, a contemporary of Coleridge-Taylor.
Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast conducted by Malcolm Sargent with score.
BBC Sounds broadcasts on Samuel Coleridge Taylor: Building a Library podcast with Andrew McGregor (2017) and Great Lives with Howard Goodall (2005)
