BACKGROUND TO… Coleridge-taylor’s

African Romances

The year before he started work on Hiawatha’s Wedding Feast, Samuel Coleridge-taylor composed the African Romances. A set of seven songs, the work – written for voice and piano

– is based on a set of poems by the Africanamerican novelist and poet Paul Dunbar. One of the most influential black writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries (he died in 1906), Dunbar was introduced to the composer while on a visit to London in the 1890s. These songs are largely based on poems from the writer’s 1895 collection Major and Minors.