Croydon composer: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor
Chi-chi Nwanoku is the special guest at the Croydon Clocktower this Tuesday, November 4, when the David Lean Cinema will be screening an episode from Sky Arts’ Passions series about Croydon composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, who was born 150 years ago.
Coleridge-Taylor is reckoned to be one of the great composers of the 20th Century, yet when he collapsed outside West Croydon Station in 1912 and died soon after, he was penniless.
Coleridge-Taylor was Nwanoku’s choice for her episode of the Passions documentary series, and she will take audience questions after the screening in a special Q&A.
And in a first for the volunteer-run arts cinema, Nwanoku will also be joined by Julián Gil Rodríguez, principle second violin of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Liberian-Norwegian pianist Kamilla Arku, to give a live performance of some of Coleridge-Taylor’s music.
The David Lean Cinema is an award-winning independent cinema and is housed in Croydon Clocktower, Katharine Street, Croydon, CR9 1ET.
The cinema screens everything from arthouse pictures to world cinema and the latest blockbusters, as well as exclusive Q&As with actors, directors and screenwriters.
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Oh, this IS brilliant. Thanks. My church choir has had a go at some of his less well known works, thought those are very Victorian. (For younger readers, he was no Stormzy.) Coleridge-Taylor was tutored, as you say, by C. V. Stanford, the rather staid musician who recognised his talent and supported him. Colour, it seems, was not the barrier to the advancement of talented people that we all assume was the case in those so-called backward times.
Inside Croydon’s great post made me find out more and I was amazed to discover that after Coleridge-Taylor’s degree he was appointed a professor at the Crystal Palace School of Music – an organisation that I had never heard of and which seems to have been largely erased from local history.
Why isn’t this pioneering local institution isn’t better known, celebrated even? I might ask the mayor, who I know is a great supporter of the arts.
The school of music was part of the Crystal Palace School of Art, Science and Literature, also known as Crystal Palace Company’s School of Art. Wikipedia tells us that it was opened in 1854 by the Crystal Palace Company in part of the centrepiece building of the Great Exhibition, following its re-erection in Norwood.
These institutions mostly served women, who didn’t have the same access as men to further education. It was a part of the great movements for educational and social reform in nineteenth century.
And, then the Crystal Palace burned down in 1936. Perhaps IC’s sophisticated readers can tell us more about its legacy?