Taylor was an eminent British composer of the late nineteenth century. Born and bred in London and the vicinity, he enjoyed a highly successful career as both a prolific composer and an admired conductor during his relatively short life. He was the illegitimate son of a British woman and a mixed race Creole doctor from the British colony of Sierra Leone, in West Africa. Except for Liberia, Sierra Leone is unique in African history and culture, being founded in the eighteenth century by various groups of expatriate African-Americans, many of mixed races, who left the New World and immigrated back to Africa. English was, and is, the official language. The Creoles of Sierra Leone, under the colonial British, lived in a culture with many Western institutions, and distinguished themselves in medicine, politics, science, the arts and more. The presence of a doctor from Sierra Leone in London at that time would not have been exceptional at all. Taylor’s father, Daniel Taylor, left England before Taylor was born, probably ignorant of the situation and the youth was raised by his mother in the warm arms of a lower class English extended family.
His musical talent became evident early, and by the age of fifteen he was enrolled in the Royal College of Music to study violin, but soon switched his interest to composition. While there he was a fellow student of such luminaries as Vaughan Williams, Holst, Ireland, and Bridge. The poems of Longfellow were all the rage then, and at the age of twenty-two Taylor achieved early success with his cantata, Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast. It became all the rage in England, rivaling the popularity of Messiah and Elijah; it remains perhaps his most popular composition. He went on to compose a large variety of works, in various genres—most enjoying widespread performance and recognition.
Critics pointed to his affinity for the style of Brahms, and especially his idol, Antonín Dvořák. He later finished his Hiawatha trilogy, composing The Death of Minnehaha and Hiawatha’s Departure, and generally focusing more on vocal music in his later career. He made several trips to America, where he was hailed as a conductor, even called the “Black Mahler.” On these trips he engaged with Black American luminaries of the time, among them, Booker T. Washington, Harry T. Burleigh, and W. E. B. Du Bois. He even considered immigration the United States, perhaps more in consideration of his father’s ancestry than of the American social climate.
The four Novelettes were written in 1903, and are a modest example of his complete mastery of British late romantic musical style, as well as of his own creative voice. All four works are engaging, melodious miniatures—light and in an almost popular vein. There’s no focus here on variation, sonata form, development, recap, and the like. But rather, an attractive parade of seemingly inexhaustible melodic invention and expertly crafted string textures. A novel (sorry!) touch is the inclusion of parts for triangle and tambourine. The last movement—Novelette #4—is perhaps the most “symphonic” of the four, working thoroughly the possibilities of the distinctive opening rhythmic turn. In the best tradition of Taylor’s models, Brahms and Dvořák, it combines a melodic gift with a disciplined economy of means.
Taylor, while undoubtedly suffering social privations in Victorian England, achieved a success as a composer that would not have been possible for him in America at that time. His many works were published, admired, and widely performed all over Great Britain in a manner that one would not now have expected. So secure was his position in British public life, that upon his death at the age of thirty-seven in 1912, a great performance in Royal Albert Hall was given for the benefit of his family, and King George V awarded a life pension of £100 (about $16,000 today) annually to his widow—a significant tribute to his achievement and to a nation willing to acknowledge it.
–Wm. E. Runyan
©2021 William E. Runyan