Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was born on August 15th 1875 in London, England. His father, originally from Sierra Leone, was a talented doctor who left the family to take up a post as the Imperial Coroner in Gambia. Samuel was mostly raised by his English mother.
This was fortunate because his mother's family was very musical. After singing in church and showing significant talent on the violin, a patron, after a string of many such patrons, eventually paid his way into the Royal College of Music.
A young, small black boy, he entered the RCM in 1890, but already had composed and after impressing his teachers, a publishing house began to issue a series of his anthems.
He studies piano and violin at the Royal Conservatory, and soon becomes a composition student of the later knighted Sir Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924). Samuel's fellow students and friends included Gustav Holst (1874–1934) and Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872-1958), but it was Edward Elgar (1857-1934) who declared Taylor to be "far and away the cleverest of the young men" of this new generation of English composers.
In addition to his many compositions, (I will update more hereover soon), Taylor was also a working conductor. He conducted his own works internationally, the works of others, and he held a permanent conducting position with the Handel Society of London.
