Coleridge-Taylor, Samuel (1875-1912)

English composer. He wrote the cantata Hiawatha's Wedding Feast (1898), a setting in three parts of Longfellow's poem. The son of a West African doctor and an English mother, he was a student and champion of traditional black music.

He sang at a church at Croydon as a boy, and entered the Royal College of Music as a violin student in 1890, but also studied composition under Charles Stanford. He had works performed while still at college and in 1899 he was represented at the North Staffordshire Festival at Hanley. He was appointed conductor of the Handel Society in 1904, and visited the USA that year, as well as in 1906 and 1910; but otherwise devoted all his time to composition and private teaching. In the last years of his life he did some teaching at the Guildhall School of Music, London.

Works Stage Thelma (1907-09); incidental music for Shakespeare's Othello and Stephen Phillips's Herod, Ulysses, Nero, and Faust (after Goethe).

Voices and orchestra settings for solo voices, chorus, and orchestra of portions from Longfellow's ‘Hiawatha’ (three parts, 1898), Coleridge's ‘Kubla Khan’ (1905), Noyes's ‘A Tale of Old Japan’; ‘Five Choral Ballads’ (Longfellow), ‘Sea Drift’ (Whitman) for chorus; oratorio The Atonement.

Orchestral symphony in A minor; violin concerto in G minor.

Chamber nonet for strings and wind, piano quintet, clarinet quintet, string quartet in D minor, and other chamber music.

Other piano music, songs.