When Avril Coleridge-Taylor tried to make sense of the events unfolding around her during World War II, she responded in the only way that made sense to her — through composing. By the war’s end she had written a significant number of war works, ranging from a solo piano piece commemorating the R.A.F. dead, to a vast choral and orchestral epic based on General MacArthur’s disastrous campaign in the Philippines. Yet at the time of her death in 1998, most of these pieces remained unpremiered. Even today, Avril Coleridge-Taylor’s music is relatively unknown. If she has been heard of at all, it is mostly for being the daughter of composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. This talk explores Coleridge-Taylor’s wartime work, and the biographical issues that arise when writing about this period of her life.

Biography

Leah Broad is an award-winning music writer and historian. She is the author of Quartet: How Four Women Challenged the Musical World, a group biography of four women composers — Ethel Smyth, Rebecca Clarke, Dorothy Howell, and Doreen Carwithen. Quartet has been hailed as “a new kind of music biography” (The New York Review of Books), “inspiring” (The Guardian), “magnificent” (Kate Mosse), “fabulous” (The Sunday Times),and “a blast of fresh air” (Kate Molleson). It won the Royal Philharmonic Society’s Storytelling Prize 2024, a Presto Books of the Year Award 2023, and was shortlisted for the Slightly Foxed Best First Biography 2024. Her forthcoming book about women and music in World War II is the recipient of a Whiting Foundation Grant 2024, described as “a revelatory angle on a colossal historical event, transforming what we think we know about women’s experience of war.” She holds a DPhil from the University of Oxford, where she recently held a post as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow, and is a fellow of the Royal Historical Society.