The British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was the child of an English woman and a trained physician from Sierra Leone, a British colony in Africa, that was originally established as a refuge for those who had been freed from or escaped enslavement. Because Coleridge-Taylor’s father could not maintain a medical practice in Britain because of his race, he returned to Africa permanently around the time of Samuel's birth without knowing that a white British woman was pregnant with his son. The composer’s mother named her son after the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
The boy’s grandfather introduced Samuel to his own instrument, the violin, which the composer began to study as a young child. The young Coleridge-Taylor also sang in a church choir; a member of that choir, Col. Herbert Walters, took the young boy under his wing and began his musical education. Coleridge-Taylor later went to the Royal College of Music, where he formally studied violin and composition (with Charles Villiers Stanford). Soon after, he began collaborating with the African American poet and author Paul Lawrence Dunbar.
In addition to creating a large and varied body of composition, Coleridge-Taylor was the conductor of the Handel Society of London from 1904 until his death. He also taught at the Croydon Conservatory, was a professor of composition at Trinity College of Music and the Guildhall School of Music, and was a violin teacher at the Royal Academy of Music. He died of pneumonia at the age of 37.
Jeffrey Green speaks of the legacy Coleridge-Taylor left for musicians of African descent: “With his Nonet in F, as well as by being visibly and proudly of African descent, the music and the achievements of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor had made Black concert musicians proud and able to walk tall, especially in America, where the compositions of European masters dominated in concert hall programs.” Aaron Grad similarly comments that in his later years, Coleridge-Taylor channeled African and African American themes into works that became very important for future generations of African American composers, a project that was still in its formative stages when he died.
Coleridge-Taylor composed the Nonet in 1893, during his first year of formal composition study. The work displays how much progress he had already made as a composer. Young Coleridge-Taylor showed quite a bit of originality in assembling a non-standard grouping of instruments, scoring the Nonet for oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, violin, viola, cello, double bass, and piano. This particular combination of winds, strings, and piano contributed to a level of sound complexity that the young composer handled extremely well. Some feel that its scoring helped to make it almost orchestral in sound.
Although the Nonet debuted in 1894, it was not published until 2001. Until then, the manuscript languished in the Royal College of Music in London, where Coleridge-Taylor studied for several years.
The influence of Dvořák as well as that of Brahms, both of whom Coleridge-Taylor admired greatly, is evident in the opening theme of the first movement and occasionally in Coleridge-Taylor’s harmonies. However, it should be understood that Coleridge-Taylor was still a teenager when he composed these four large and attractive movements. The individuality of Coleridge-Taylor’s distinctive style is certainly also evident throughout the whole work. In particular, the slow movement has very florid lines and a truly masterful second theme.
Program notes by © Susan Halpern 2025