Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was an Anglo-African musician. After studying composition with Stanford at the Royal College of Music, Coleridge-Taylor went on to lead a distinguished career as a composer, conductor, and teacher. His music encompasses orchestral, chamber, and vocal works, and was admired both in England and the US, where Coleridge-Taylor counted among his friends and supporters some of the most important black figures of the day, such as Paul Laurence Dunbar, with whom he collaborated closely on several projects; Frederick Loudin, director of the Fisk Jubilee Singers; the writer W.E.B. Dubois; and Booker T. Washington, who wrote the Preface to Coleridge-Taylor’s Twenty-Four Negro Melodies (1905). Coleridge-Taylor was appointed professor of composition at Trinity College of Music in London in 1903, and also at the Guildhall School of Music in 1910. His frantically busy schedule of activities may have contributed to his death from pneumonia in 1912.
Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Nonet was written in 1894, when he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. It is in four large movements, and its scoring makes it almost orchestral in sound. This is its first publication and the audio clips are taken from the first modern performance of the piece in Columbus, Ohio, in 1998.

Audio sample is taken from first modern performance, in 1998.

Difficulty level: Professional

Nonet, Opus 2: 1st movement

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