Future research.

During the preparations for this issue, I was aware that there were several aspects of Coleridge-Taylor that needed action, despite the apparent wealth of biographical and analytical publications. Efforts to add his compositions into the current repertory of more musicians, the need to correct misunderstandings about the composer's family, the impact of Africa, and the American experience are evident from the articles presented here.

The death of the composer's daughter since the publication of contributor Geoffrey Self's The Hiawatha Man (1995) has resulted in more documentation being deposited at the Royal College of Music, holdings that already included wonders such as cards from wreaths sent to the composer's funeral in 1912 and a nearly blank notebook that contained strands of the composer's hair. These new materials may assist scholars in resolving some of the issues about Coleridge-Taylor that remain. Among these is the relationship of Coleridge-Taylor and the Holmans family, notably the composer's musical uncle, Benjamin Holmans Jr., and his children. The recent release of the British census of 1901 may assist in tracking down modern relatives. The musical capabilities of the fifteen-year-old Coleridge-Taylor were apparent both at the time of his entrance interview and within weeks of beginning his studies at the Royal College of Music. Could this uncle be the significant influence? The African family also has to pursued. The gravestone of Dr. Taylor, the composer's father, in Banjul states that it was erected by the doctor's daughter. Dating from 1904, the grave is in poor condition following the collapse of a nearby wall, so even this clue may soon disappear.

The composer's early contacts with men and women of African birth or descent remain largely speculative, with present evidence suggesting that these acquaintances first occurred when the composer was twenty-one or twenty-two. As his student routine was traveling to and from a major railroad station in central London, going to the college, to concerts, and elsewhere in the city, he had opportunities to meet black strangers who--given the limited number of black people in London in the 1890s--would surely have been impelled to stop and talk. In particular, the exact circumstances of how Paul Dunbar came to meet Coleridge-Taylor would be informative.

One black American whose friendship with the composer was recalled by Marjorie Evans was Henry Francis Downing, one-time federal diplomat in Luanda, later a London resident and author (Green 1998, 192, 197-198, 215). Downing may have read a reference to the young composer in the London press and then sought him out at the college. A Dunbar-Coleridge-Taylor program (1897) includes an annotation that the Downings gave it to the composer's mother, but we do not know if the Downings were present at the event. Because it was sponsored by the U.S. ambassador and the Downings seem to have resided in London during 1896-97, they may have been invited; Downing had been in the U.S. foreign service and so would have been known to the London embassy. Items concerning black affairs in Britain that appeared in the U.S. journal The Crisis from its first editions in 1910 suggest that Downing was editor Du Bois' informant. Downing contributed to the African Times and Orient Review, a black-edited London publication established in 1912 by Due Mohamed Ali. In The Comet of Lagos (Nigeria) of September 6, 1941, Ali provided an appreciation of the composer--culled from Sayers' biography. Ali, an England-based actor and journalist in the 1900s and 1910s, seems to have had little contact with the composer. Again, little is known for certain. The press of British West Africa is a useful source for details of black activities in Britain and may reveal aspects of Coleridge-Taylor's music in local performance, as well as reactions to his achievements.

Coleridge-Taylor's role in and after the Pan-African Conference of 1900 also remains unresolved, although we know that he and his wife, Downing and his wife, and the Loudins were on the committee of the postconference Pan-African Association (Geiss 1974, 192). One clue may point to the composer's involvement: the words of the songs that were presented during the conference were printed by a Croydon company ("Pan-African Conference" 1900). Other scattered documentation must exist and may throw light on the Downings, who are believed to have returned to the United States around 1916 when Mr. Downing was approaching seventy years of age.

The Coleridge-Taylor family's financial position also needs investigation. The belief that Coleridge-Taylor was duped by his publishers, or at least received an unfair arrangement over The Song of Hiawatha, has been shown to be unsupported by the evidence. Michael Hurd's (1981) study of the publishing house Novello deserves to be better known. Curiously, there is further confusion in a normally reliable source, the annual British Calendar of the Grants of Probate and Letters of Administration 1912 (1913, 21). When a person dies leaving a will that is proved (accepted as final), or when no will is found, a grant of probate is issued and a summary of the estate is published in these annual reports. The summary for Coleridge-Taylor in the central London archive contains a handwritten alteration, increasing the estate by nearly 50 percent. The increase probably resulted from the memorial concert of late 1912. Unless that alteration was made in every copy, the value of the composer's estate will likely be understated.

Copyright--or the absence of it--was not a problem faced solely by Coleridge-Taylor, and an understanding of the era comes from Hurd's discussion of 1930s legal battles between the composer's son and Novello. Authors and publishers such as Novello suffered from pirate copying--not in the casual manner of the photocopier era but in a sustained manner. In response, the Musical Defence League became active in the 1900s. Popular music was copied without permission, and millions of copies were sold by street hawkers. An act of Parliament in 1902 gave limited powers to the police, but hawkers could not be compelled to give their own address or that of their employers. Police were not permitted to search premises where these pirate copies were printed or stored. While one might assume that the bulk of these pirate copies were of sentimental ballads and the like, a meeting of the Musical Defence League in the Queen's Hall, London, in July 1904 included Elgar, Parry, and Alexander Mackenzie (of the Royal Academy of Music); since those concert-music composers were concerned enough with the problem to attend this meeting, one can assume that Coleridge-Taylor's music likely would also have been "stolen" in this way. As a result of this meeting, Parliament passed an act in 1906 that put the pirates out of business (Elkin 1944, 124). Research into how such piracy affected Coleridge-Taylor would be useful.

There were apparently plans for Coleridge-Taylor to visit Germany dating from the time of the first triumph of The Song of Hiawatha, and the composer is known to have worked on his language skills (Evans 1985). It seems that part of The Song of Hiawatha was translated into German and published in Germany by Breitkopf and Hartel, but since their archives are in Leipzig, long behind the iron curtain in East Germany, access has been difficult. The fact that postcard portrait photographs of the composer were published by the company is intriguing; printed in Germany, as were many such cards in England in the 1900s, the cards list the company's address as 54 Great Marlborough Street, London.

The Dusseldorf music festivals, which Coleridge-Taylor's mentor, August Jaeger, considered likely venues for the composer's music, need investigation. We know that Julius Buths translated Elgar's Gerontius, which he first heard at its British premiere in Birmingham, and presented it in Dusseldorf in December 1901. Buths had given the first German performance of Elgar's Enigma Variations in February of that year. Elgar's biographer suggests that Jaeger had persuaded Novello to invite Buths to Birmingham, "it is said, on the strength of Hiawatha's Departure" (Kennedy 1968, 95-99). The subject cries out for investigation.

Scholarly activities have thrown light on several of Coleridge-Taylor's musical contemporaries. Among the resulting books, one can find much to stimulate thoughts on Coleridge-Taylor. In Jeremy Dibble's biography of C. Hubert Parry, who taught Coleridge-Taylor at college, we find that when the Royal College of Music opened in 1883, there were 1,581 applications for places; 480 candidates were interviewed; and 50 scholars and 44 pupils were taken (Dibble 1992, 213). These numbers suggest that when Coleridge-Taylor applied in 1890, he also faced considerable competition for a place.

Michael Musgrave's (1995) study of music at the Crystal Palace--Coleridge-Taylor's nearby arts center--clarifies much of the nature of concert music in late nineteenth-century London. Kevin Allen's study of August Jaeger reveals much about Coleridge-Taylor's mentor and how music was circulated among musical associates long before publication; the music of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast was discussed in July 1898, four months before its premiere (Allen 2000, 45). Further investigation should reveal the normal time lapse between completion and publication. In the example of Hiawatha's Wedding Feast, its creation was in the spring of 1898, and Jaeger indicated that publication had been scheduled for 1899.

Coleridge-Taylor's handwriting is notoriously difficult to read, and the writing of colleagues and associates is also not without problems. For example, in a letter to music journalist Herbert Thompson on March 4, 1901, Jaeger remarked of Coleridge-Taylor's "easy invention of Tune," and stated that composer William Henry Bell (1873-1946) "has certainly vastly more meaning than the young Blackie, & more depth & poetic imagination." The letter was published by Foreman (1987, 11-12), as well as by Allen (2000, 101-102), with some differences; Allen interpreted the passage to read that Bell "has certainly more Brains [sic] than the young Blackie." There is also the matter of Hans Richter's diary, in which Coleridge-Taylor is described as a "nigger" (Fifield 1993, 328). However, Richter wrote in German, and that language seems to lack the clear and painful distinction that English has between "Negro" and "nigger"; so his intentions may not be clear.

The relative importance of Elgar and Coleridge-Taylor needs to be studied from a contemporary perspective. Jaeger wrote about Elgar to Parry, head of the Royal College of Music, on September 25, 1896, stating, "The young man has imagination, beauty, strength, 'go.' He is exceptionally gifted" (Dibble 1992, 340). Elgar was then older than Coleridge-Taylor was to be when pneumonia struck the younger composer down in 1912. Likewise, when Elgar wrote to the Royal Philharmonic Society in 1897, he was diffident--"You may have heard my name as a composer during the last two years." He added that he knew none of the society's directors (Elkin 1946, 93). The letter was dated October 29 (or 27), 1897, when the writer, anxious to obtain a London hearing, was forty years old. It cannot be true that the Elgar who recommended that the Three Choirs Festival try Coleridge-Taylor in 1898 was the nationally recognized master Elgar had become by 1902--in 1898, Elgar was still a regional (if not a provincial) musician and teacher, with ambitions, of course. Had the Worcester festival not obtained Coleridge-Taylor in 1898, they surely would have fought for him in 1899, after the success of The Song of Hiawatha. Within two or three years, Elgar seems to have had the greater reputation among musicians while Coleridge-Taylor had massive popular adulation. Careful study of contemporary sources could clarify the two men's relative importance.

The venues for performances of Coleridge-Taylor's music is another area ripe for further research. Programs in local history archives and on sale at ephemera fairs reveal the extent of the public's appreciation for his music and how it survived in performance decades after the composer's death. Britain's major musical publications may ignore nonmetropolitan events, but the hours of rehearsal, the concert promotions, and audiences throughout England and abroad will reveal the extent of the popularity of Coleridge-Taylor's music. The newspapers of Bournemouth, for example, where an orchestra led by Dan Godfrey was so well established, seem to cry out for research.

A collection of programs in Croydon's library shows an extensive range of music conducted by the composer with local performers, strongly suggesting that Coleridge-Taylor's role as a conductor deserves detailed research. In these and other public performances, his musical skills reached hundreds of thousands--an aspect of music that modern music lovers, with their personal libraries of compact discs, can too easily overlook.

Many research opportunities remain to be investigated. Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was a remarkable individual. In these essays, he has attracted attention from six researchers--diverse in age, gender, natal lands, residence, experience of Africa, capacity to play music, yet united in a love of music and a deepening interest in the man and his music.

REFERENCES

Allen, Kevin. 2000. August Jaeger: Portrait of Nimrod. Burlington, N.H.: Ashgate.

Calendar of the grants of probate and letters of administration 1912. 1913. Hastings, England: His Majesty's Stationery Office.

Dibble, Jeremy. 1992. C. Hubert H. Parry. Oxford: Clarendon.

Dunbar-Coleridge-Taylor program. 1897. Concert held at Salle Erard, Great Marlborough Street, London, Saturday, June 5. Photocopy in the possession of the author.

Elkin, Robert. 1944. Queen's Hall, 1893-1941. London: Rider.

--. 1946. Royal Philharmonic: The annals of the Royal Philharmonic Society. London: Rider.

Evans, Marjorie. 1985. Interview with the author, August 5.

Fifield, Christopher. 1993. True artist and true friend: A biography of Hans Richter. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Foreman, Lewis. 1987. From Parry to Britten: British music in letters 1900-1945. London: Batsford.

Geiss, Imanuel. 1974. The Pan-African movement. London: Methuen.

Green, Jeffrey. 1998. Black Edwardians: Black people in Britain, 1901-1914. London: Frank Cass.

Hurd, Michael. 1981. Vincent Novello--and company. London: Granada.

Kennedy, Michael. 1968. Portrait of Elgar. London: Oxford University Press.

Musgrave, Michael. 1995. The musical life of the Crystal Palace. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.

Pan-African Conference, Westminster, July 23rd, 24th, and 25th. 1900. Program. Held in The Anna Logan Papers, Moorland-Springarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.

Self, Geoffrey. 1995. The Hiawatha man: The life and work of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Aldershot, England: Scolar Press.