Luke Welch - Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Piano Works (2023)

"Everything is sort of connected to COVID," Luke says. "What had happened, when COVID first hit and all my concerts were cancelled, I decided to start a concert series from my living room," he explains.

His original intention was to cycle through a variety of composers - but he also, as many of us did at first, assumed that the pandemic would last a few weeks or months, and then things would go back to normal...

After about 8 months of online concerts, he was looking for new material to delve into. He had written a blog post about being a Black classical musician that had struck a chord with many of its readers. It led him to explore the field of Black classical composers

"I looked at Florence Price, Nathanial Dett," he says. He found mention of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor in books, but very few recordings, and literally no reference material to work from.

"Even finding the actual original scores, it took me a year," he says, describing a process of hunting them down on the internet via eBay and random people who happened to have them, including some from the UK.

"It's just nowhere," he said. It led to a realization. "It's time to start promoting this guy," he says. It put him in an odd position as a performer of works that were hundreds of years old. "I'd never heard the music before I recorded it."

In 2023, Coleridge-Taylor's discography is actually growing. "We seem to have caught the right trend."

Black classical composers are only now beginning to get their due. Like his blog post, however, it's a topic that still sparks debate, including negative reactions.