![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
drplaceboIt's Forgotten Masterpiece Friday!
Black History Month continues with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), an English composer of Sierra Leone Krio descent known as the "African Mahler." It's easy to wonder what he might have done had he lived longer; he died of pneumonia at the height of his career, just as he was achieving widespread fame in the UK and the United States. Coleridge-Taylor's best known work, his secular cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, remains somewhat widely performed, but his other music is well worth listening to as well.
This week's piece is Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto, his last work. Like much of his music, it was commissioned by an American -- in this case violinist Maud Powell. The composer was forced to rewrite the concerto in its entirety, after the only copy of the score and parts was lost at sea en route to the United States. (Urban legend has it that the concerto was aboard the Titanic; it were in fact lost in the sinking of a different ship.) Coleridge-Taylor initially sought to draw thematic material from African-American spirituals, but eventually, unsatisfied with the results, he used entirely original thematic material. Nonetheless, some elements seem reminiscent of both American folk music and Dvorák's "American" works, especially in the first movement.
Black History Month continues with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912), an English composer of Sierra Leone Krio descent known as the "African Mahler." It's easy to wonder what he might have done had he lived longer; he died of pneumonia at the height of his career, just as he was achieving widespread fame in the UK and the United States. Coleridge-Taylor's best known work, his secular cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, remains somewhat widely performed, but his other music is well worth listening to as well.
This week's piece is Coleridge-Taylor's Violin Concerto, his last work. Like much of his music, it was commissioned by an American -- in this case violinist Maud Powell. The composer was forced to rewrite the concerto in its entirety, after the only copy of the score and parts was lost at sea en route to the United States. (Urban legend has it that the concerto was aboard the Titanic; it were in fact lost in the sinking of a different ship.) Coleridge-Taylor initially sought to draw thematic material from African-American spirituals, but eventually, unsatisfied with the results, he used entirely original thematic material. Nonetheless, some elements seem reminiscent of both American folk music and Dvorák's "American" works, especially in the first movement.