Samuel Coleridge-Taylor ― Ballade for orchestra Op.33

Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (15 August 1875 – 1 September 1912) was an English composer of Creole descent who achieved such success that he was once called the "African Mahler".
 

 

Commissioned in 1898 by the Three Choirs Festival of Britain thanks to pressure from Edward Elgar, the Ballade for orchestra Op.33 represents an important early milestone for the English composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875-1912). It's a work full of wonderful high-spirits, passion and warmth. Above all it's a harbinger of what might come, given time and opportunity. It is played here by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Grant Llewellyn.

Dr. John McWhorter - What the World Will Speak in 2115

via The Wall Street Journal

"In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. He mixed words from French, German and English and gave his creation the name Volapük, which didn’t do it any favors. Worse, Volapük was hard to use, sprinkled with odd sounds and case endings like Latin.

It made a splash for a few years but was soon pushed aside by another invented language, Esperanto, which had a lyrical name and was much easier to master. A game learner could pick up its rules of usage in an afternoon. 

 But it didn’t matter. By the time Esperanto got out of the gate, another language was already emerging as an international medium: English. Two thousand years ago, English was the unwritten tongue of Iron Age tribes in Denmark. A thousand years after that, it was living in the shadow of French-speaking overlords on a dampish little island. No one then living could have dreamed that English would be spoken today, to some degree, by almost two billion people, on its way to being spoken by every third person on the planet."

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