Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Four Novelettes
This week’s Audio Flashback is Samuel Coleridge-Taylor‘s Four Novelettes. Coleridge-Taylor honored his pan-African heritage with ever-mellifluous compositions that increasingly embraced syncopation. African American elites of the Gilded Age cherished him. Whitney Slaten, Assistant Professor of Music at Bard College, writes in the concert notes: “Though Coleridge-Taylor has been called the “Black Mahler,” there are more apt musical analogies. One writer … hears “touches of Brahms and the blues.” Similarly, one could listen to the dotted rhythms that introduce the first movement and find echoes of Handel, who used them to pronounce the regality in his oratorio Messiah.” TŌN performed the piece with conductor Zachary Schwartzman on September 19, 2020 as part of the “Out of the Silence” festival, presented with the Bard Music Festival and the Fisher Center at Bard. You can read Whitney Slaten’s full concert notes on the work by clicking here.