- Born August 15, 1875, in London
- Died September 1, 1912, in London
- Composed in 1904
- Duration: 18 minutes

In 1905, the Boston publishing house Ditson released a book of solo keyboard pieces by the British composer and pianist Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. In these 24 Negro Melodies (Op. 59), he builds short concert numbers out of existing folk songs and dances. It was important to Coleridge-Taylor that his creations give appropriate credit to their origins; in his preface to the volume, he explains that “the actual melody has in every case been inserted at the head of each piece as a motto. The music which follows is nothing more nor less than a series of variations built on said motto. Therefore my share in the matter can be clearly traced, and must not be confounded with any idea of ‘improving’ the original material.” The set was well received and featured an introductory note from Booker T. Washington, who expressed excitement about Coleridge-Taylor’s success as a mixed-race composer in England and extolled how he “has in handling these melodies preserved their distinctive traits and individuality, at the same time giving them an art form fully imbued with their essential spirit.”

Most of the pieces in the book are cited as “American Negro” songs, but the first few are instead described as coming from the African continent. Before one, a “West African Drum-Call” that Coleridge-Taylor was familiar with is transcribed in the motto, and other tunes were apparently found in a collection compiled by the ethnographer Henri-Alexandre Junot. The inclusion of these numbers forms a continuity with many works that the composer had written over the course of his career: his 1897 African Romances, vocal settings of poetry by Paul Laurence Dunbar (Op. 17); an African Suite for piano (Op. 35); and indeed, the piece that Coleridge-Taylor had published immediately prior to 24 Negro Melodies, a set of Four African Dances for Violin and Piano (Op. 58). He originally wrote these violin miniatures to play together with the British violinist John Saunders, but they became a staple of the tours that he undertook in the United States in the first decade of the 20th century, and were likely an important testing ground for his approach to combining folk music with the structures and harmonic language of turn-of-the-century composition.

The African Dances do not have epigraphs that point back to specific source material. But the violin’s gesture at the start of the first dance, which is repeated four times with no accompaniment, certainly has the effect of a drum call, establishing a rhythmic refrain on which the rest of the music will expand. In the manuscript to the second movement, Coleridge-Taylor jotted down that the tune was an African folk song. The piano provides a bright, almost strummed accompaniment while the violin alternates between short, lyrical phrases with a restricted tessitura and longer, leap-filled lines that cover a wider range. This latter, leapy motif is transformed to become the main material of the outer sections of the joyous Allegro con brio. A contrasting episode in this third dance employs a theme that also appears in Coleridge-Taylor’s first published work, the Piano Quintet in G minor (Op. 1). It’s an allusion that tightens the connection between the composer’s larger oeuvre and a network of pan-African sounds and styles he wanted to tap into. In the final movement, a swagger-filled romp with theatrical offbeats in the piano, we get a taste for Coleridge-Taylor’s salon composing. Here, he must have had the violinist in mind, as it is a conclusion that brings the capacities and energy of the player to the fore. 

Cellist, writer, and music researcher Nicky Swett is a PhD candidate and Gates Scholar at the University of Cambridge.