I wrote concert notes and introduced the works of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the Chevalier de Saint-Georges, and Duke Ellington for the “Out of the Silence” programs of the 2020 Bard Music Festival.

Four Novelettes, op. 52 (1903), Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, composer

Program notes by Whitney Slaten

Ever mellifluous, with a growing embrace of syncopations that would mean to honor his pan-African heritage, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912) was an important English composer. African American elites of the Gilded Age cherished him. The chance to be among them was significant, as Coleridge-Taylor was a descendant of enslaved African Americans who fought in the American Revolution. These “Black Loyalists” combatted Washington’s army in exchange for manumission and land ownership, primarily in Nova Scotia or Sierra Leone. Samuel’s father—Daniel Taylor, born in 1849 in Freetown, Sierra Leone—moved to England, where he became a physician. Samuel’s mother—Alice Marten of Castle Place, Dover—raised him in Croydon, as his father returned to Africa. 

In 1890, Coleridge-Taylor matriculated at the Royal College of Music in London, studying composition with Charles Villars Stanford. Sir Edward Elgar encouraged him and a friendship with the poet Paul Lawrence Dunbar marked a turn in the composer’s life. Dunbar revealed for Coleridge-Taylor the many ways to explore the beauty of his father’s race. Meeting other noteworthy African Americans—including W. E. B. DuBois—Coleridge-Taylor attended the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900. In 1904, The Coleridge-Taylor Society invited him to Washington D.C. to conduct his Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast (1898). There, he met Theodore Roosevelt, and this initiated the first of three tours of the United States. These experiences encouraged him to emphasize musical sounds that would signal regard for his people. Rhythm—too frequently conjuring stereotypes of blackness in certain music—was one feature that Coleridge-Taylor engaged with greater intentionality. 

Four Novelettes, Op. 52, for string orchestra, tambourine, and triangle, premiered in 1902 at the Croydon Conservatoire. It is one example by the composer known as the “Black Mahler.” This would not remain the only comparison to fellow composers. One writer encounters a continuation of the “stylistic tradition of Gade and Dvo?ák” in Coleridge-Taylor’s Four Novelettes, adding that it “excels in a great variety of motifs.” Anotherhears “touches of Brahms and the blues.” Similarly, one could listen to the dotted rhythms that introduce the first movement that might evoke Handel, who used them to pronounce the regality of the Messiah. Coleridge-Taylor may have used them to foreground the mark of older and dignified musical expressions of time and the legacy of a noble people, out of the silence.