Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: The Development of His Compositional Style (review)

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: The Development of His Compositional Style, by Jewel Taylor Thompson. Metuchen: Scarecrow, 1994. xii + 193 pp. ISBN 08108-2737-9 cloth.

Some years ago I gave an interview to a German broadcaster who was collecting information on African composers, with a view to doing some radio programs. His interest in their music was prompted by the release of the Kronos Quartet CD, Pieces of Africa, before which this broadcaster admitted he knew nothing about neo-African art music. As he described it to me, after listening to the CD, the broadcaster said to himself, "Surely this cannot be all . . . ," and so he decided to find out more about this music. The search eventually led him to Ghana where he made a 45-minute television documentary on Ghanaian composers, which was broadcast in Berlin.

Although it is true that the Kronos Quartet CD helped tremendously to project interest in the music of African composers, the development of neo-African art music began well over a hundred years ago. Why is it, then, that African composers have not made the kind of impact that their counterparts in African literature have? The reasons are varied and complex and have been well articulated by other authors (see for example Kofi Agawu's review of Joshua Uzoigwe's Akin Euba; see also Irele). Whatever the reasons, there has been no dearth of talent or activity among African composers and it was inevitable that the kind of attention that African literature has enjoyed since the 1960s would also sooner or later come to neo-African art music. Apart from the Kronos Quartet CD and the landmark television documentary on Ghanaian composers, there have been other events that indicate a rising interest in neo-African art music. In May 1995, the Hochschule für Musik in Würzburg, Germany, devoted its tenth annual festival of new music entirely to the works of African composers, an event that attracted considerable attention in the German Press. Prof. Dr. Klaus Hinrich Stahmer, who directed the festival, has also launched a new series of publications, the New African Music Project, devoted to the works of African composers.

In September 1995, the City of Birmingham Touring Opera, as its contribution to AFRICA 95 (a major celebration of African arts that took place in various parts of the United Kingdom), premiered my Chaka (from Léopold Senghor's epic poem) in a semi-staged performance at the Symphony Hall, Birmingham. In taking the hitherto unusual step of including neo-African art music as part of AFRICA 95, the organizers of this festival sought to generate the kind of interest that would bring this music into the main venues of British concert life. One of the immediate results of this endeavor has been the commissioning of a concerto for multiple pianos and orchestra from the young Ghanaian composer Gyimah Labi, which was premiered by the Piano Circus and the Liverpool Orchestra in November 1996 in Liverpool. Against this background, Thompson's important study of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) comes at a most timely period in the history of neo-African art music.

According to Thompson, Coleridge-Taylor was a major figure in British music during the late 1890s and early 1900s; he "enjoyed the respect of his contemporaries, such as Sir Arthur Sullivan, Sir Edward Elgar, Gustav Holst, and Ralph Vaughan-Williams" (ix). Indeed Elgar described Coleridge-Taylor as the cleverest of the younger generation of composers (5), which included Holst (1874-1934) and Vaughan-Williams (1872-1958). At the Royal Concert presented at the Albert Hall, London, in May 1912, as part of the coronation festivities for King George V, Coleridge-Taylor's music featured along with that of other major European composeres. None of the composers listed on the program was represented by more than one work, with the exception of Wagner and Coleridge-Taylor, a point that drew comment from the Berlin newspapers...