Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor recalls his experiences as a judge in the distrustful world of music festivals and brass band contests.
‘Don’t you undertake that job at any price!’ was the advice given to composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor when he was first offered the role of judge at an eisteddfod. But he went, and never regretted it. He fell in love with Wales, and was much in demand ever after for choir festivals and brass band competitions across England too. Even so, the work was not for the faint-hearted.
Berwick Sayers tells how his friend, the composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, set out on his last voyage.
Composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912) died of pneumonia at the age of thirty-seven, leaving behind him his wife Jessie and two children, and a treasury of tuneful and often innovative music that is beginning to be appreciated again today. A close family friend, Berwick Sayers, tells of his last hours.
A gifted composer of classical music in the romantic tradition, admired by Stanford, Elgar, and Sullivan.
Daniel Taylor, a medical doctor who was later a coroner and magistrate in the Gambia, had a brief affair with an unmarried woman in London named Alice Martin. The result was a boy she named Samuel Coleridge Taylor, after the famous poet (it was Samuel who hyphenated it as Coleridge-Taylor).