Coleridge-Taylor: Three Short Pieces for Organ
0:00 I. Arietta 3:15 II. Elegy 5:21 III. Melody Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was born in Surrey, England, to an English woman who had become pregnant by a visiting Krio man from Sierra Leone. Samuel was raised by his mother and her father, who encouraged his early musical ability and he was given violin lessons and entered the Royal College of Music at 15, but switched to composition and studied under Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford, one of the preeminent English composers of the time, told his friend Edward Elgar that he thought Coleridge-Taylor was "a genius" and also conducted the first performance of his "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" on a text of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor wrote three cantatas on the Hiawatha epic, which were very popular in their day, and it is because of my work with the American baritone Robert Honeysucker that I became acquainted with his compositions. Mr. Honeysucker worked with William Thomas and the Boston Coleridge Ensemble and I played the piano for him as he rehearsed the baritone parts of the Hiawatha trilogy and others of his choral works. Coleridge-Taylor wrote in the English genres of his day, meaning that in addition to the choral cantatas, there are sacred anthems, canticles, art songs, keyboard music, and concert works for orchestra. These three short pieces for organ date from 1898 and two are subtitled "introductory voluntary" pointing to them being used as church preludes. He was encouraged to draw upon his African heritage and despite being Black English, he wrote a set of 24 Negro Melodies for piano, many of which draw on American spirituals taken from sources such as Jubilee Songs as well as music from Africa and the West Indies. When he visited America, the orchestral musicians of New York liked him so much that they named him "Black Mahler" but other than the time in which he lived and the fact that he was a conductor, there are very few other similarities between the two.
0:00 I. Arietta 3:15 II. Elegy 5:21 III. Melody Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) was born in Surrey, England, to an English woman who had become pregnant by a visiting Krio man from Sierra Leone. Samuel was raised by his mother and her father, who encouraged his early musical ability and he was given violin lessons and entered the Royal College of Music at 15, but switched to composition and studied under Charles Villiers Stanford. Stanford, one of the preeminent English composers of the time, told his friend Edward Elgar that he thought Coleridge-Taylor was "a genius" and also conducted the first performance of his "Hiawatha's Wedding Feast" on a text of the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Coleridge-Taylor wrote three cantatas on the Hiawatha epic, which were very popular in their day, and it is because of my work with the American baritone Robert Honeysucker that I became acquainted with his compositions. Mr. Honeysucker worked with William Thomas and the Boston Coleridge Ensemble and I played the piano for him as he rehearsed the baritone parts of the Hiawatha trilogy and others of his choral works. Coleridge-Taylor wrote in the English genres of his day, meaning that in addition to the choral cantatas, there are sacred anthems, canticles, art songs, keyboard music, and concert works for orchestra. These three short pieces for organ date from 1898 and two are subtitled "introductory voluntary" pointing to them being used as church preludes. He was encouraged to draw upon his African heritage and despite being Black English, he wrote a set of 24 Negro Melodies for piano, many of which draw on American spirituals taken from sources such as Jubilee Songs as well as music from Africa and the West Indies. When he visited America, the orchestral musicians of New York liked him so much that they named him "Black Mahler" but other than the time in which he lived and the fact that he was a conductor, there are very few other similarities between the two.