Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel

1875-

An original figure in music. He was born in London, and is a mulatto, his mother having been an English woman and his father a fullblooded African. The latter was an educated man and encouraged the boy at the age of six to begin the study of the violin, under Joseph Beckwith at the Croyden Conservatory. This instrument has remained ever since his favorite. At ten he was a chorister and five years later began to receive instruction at the Royal College of Music, in 1893, winning a scholarship, which enabled him to study for four years composition under C. Villiers Stanford and the piano under Algernon Ashton. While studying at this institution he won a prize for a composition which he wrote for stringed instruments. His next efforts at composition were several anthems, and a symphony in A minor, which were performed at London and Liverpool. He also wrote much chamber-music, including a clarinet quintet, five fantasias for strings, and a string quartet. For the violin he composed the Southern Love Songs and the African Romances, the words of which were written by the late Paul Laurence Dunbar, and the Hiawatha sketches, which preceded his later triumphs in the same field. These were three characteristic pieces, lagoo, Chibiabos and Paupukkeewis, founded on Longfellow's Indian poem, and entitled, Scenes from Hiawatha. In 1898 he brought out his cantata, Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, and from then on his name was known throughout the musical world. Critics all agree that he is one of the best and most original composers that England has ever produced. There is a strength, a rich instrumentation and a glowing effect in his music in the Indian cantata, and its success encouraged ColeridgeTaylor to compose a year later the Hiawatha overture and a second part of the cantata called, The Death of Minnehaha, while in 1900 he produced Hiawatha's Departure. Since then he has written The Atonement, a sacred cantata, produced for the first time at the Heresford Festival in England and the Blind Girl of Castel-Cuille for the Leeds Festival. These works are said by some critics to be very weak in comparison with his first compositions and it is claimed that he is not fulfilling the promise shown in his early productions. He was commissioned to write for three musical festivals at Leeds and Birmingham. Other works that have contributed to his success as a composer are an orchestral ballade with violin; an Idyll; a prelude; the music to Herod, produced at His Majesty's Theatre, London; and four waltzes ; Hiawatha was sung for the first time in America by the St. Cecilia Society of Boston, one of the best musical organizations in America, and since then it has been given many times. The firm of Oliver Ditspn & Co. commissioned Coleridge-Taylor to write a book of negro melodies and he also wrote several choral ballads for chorus and orchestra. He is at present violin professor at Croyden Conservatory and professor of harmony and composition at the Crystal Palace. He is married to an English woman and they have two children.