TED BLACK

● Welcome to your interview with Songbirds magazine. First and foremost, please introduce yourself to our lovely readers.

My name is Ted Black. I am a singer, a tenor from London although I now live in Austria.

● How did you decide to become a singer?

When I was a teenager, I played the piano and the cello, but I never thought about singing. It‘s quite interesting when I think about it now: I always loved big powerful voices in any genre, but it never occurred to me that I could use my own voice to make music. I discovered opera around the age of 14 or 15, and I got into the opera scene by playing the cello for different opera performances in London where I was living. A singer friend I met during that time offered to give me a free singing lesson for my 17th birthday, so I took the lesson, and she told me that I had a voice, and that I could really do this if I wanted to. It took me a couple of years to think about it, and I kept taking singing lessons from her in the meantime while I worked a data entry job in a law firm before I went to college. Everything somehow happened by accident for me, and if I didn‘t have someone who gave me that push in the beginning, I would not have pursued a career in singing and probably would have ended up doing something else.

● Do you remember what your introduction to opera was specifically?

Yes, my uncle is an opera director, and in the UK we do this thing called “work experience” when you’re 14 or so, where they send you away from school for a week and you shadow someone at work. My mum organized with my uncle so that I could go to his workplace and just follow him around, and his project at the time was a Handel show at the Royal College of Music. So I became his sort of a P.A for the week, and was making lots of cups of tea and that sort of thing. I still remember the first Monday morning, arriving at the RCM during a rehearsal, where a countertenor was singing an aria (mind you, I had never seen or heard any opera at all at that time), and I really remember that as the moment where I changed from a sort of sad kid going through a pretty difficult childhood and adolescence, to being a person with a future and a sense of direction. So I had this amazing week making tea for my uncle, and my mum had recognized how much I was getting from the experience on an emotional level, so she called my school to ask whether I could stay another week, to keep helping out on the production. The school unfortunately said no, but my mum, bless her, called in sick for me every day that week and let me go to the rehearsals. In a weird twist of fate, I ended up helping out as a production assistant for those two weeks at the RCM, and then ended up doing my Master's and Artist Diploma degrees there later on. You know how scents bring back memories? I came back to that place 10 years later to audition to study there, and as soon as I walked through the door to the stage, the scent of the room just brought all those memories flooding back, and it was a really emotional moment for me. I remembered those wonderful two weeks that changed everything, and how incredibly kind everyone was to me. When I ended up studying there, it ended up being the same people running the department who were there where I was a teenager - talk about a full circle moment!

That’s really how the opera bug bit me, and after that, I listened to a lot of recordings and got my hands on what felt like every piece of opera media ever created, and I was kind of a crazy fan for a while. And then, when the time was right, I went from being a huge opera fan to being a singer myself.

● Is there also a different memory that developed the artist you are now?

Yes. When I was younger, I used to try so hard to be good: I was trying to be a good student, and then when I was in the young artist program, I tried to always do all the right things. That desire to be perfect manifested as me thinking that I had to make some kind of decision about whether I wanted to be a great opera singer, or a great song singer that I had to make a decision and fully commit to it. But then I came across so many singers who could do it all at a high level. I remember doing my undergrad in Scotland, Malcolm Martineau had a recital series where he would bring world-class singers to do a recital there, and it would be broadcast on the radio too. I think in my second year there, in 2014-15, he came with Susan Graham to do a recital of Schumann’s “Frauenliebe und Leben”, but they had paired each of the songs with other songs that told a similar story, or evoked a similar atmosphere. Up until that point, I had always thought that a song recital was something very traditional - that you had to do a set of songs from a certain composer and that’s the format in which it had to be presented. And that programme really opened my eyes to how much more creative song programming can be. I remember right after that recital I ducked away up to the piano corridor to have a cry!

Around that same time, Beyoncé released her album “Lemonade”, which had a similar concept: it took this really personal human experience of heartache and anguish to create a work of art. A recital is an album, and what I love about pop music is that it really is much more personal than what we often get to do in classical music. Performing music that you’ve written yourself, with words you’ve written about experiences in your own life, it’s just something we don’t really get to experience in the same way.

Those two experiences combined made me really look at song from a different angle. Sometimes I feel like in opera, I’m not telling a story that is completely mine, which can be true in song as well, but in opera, you’re also telling the director’s story and the conductor’s story and I sometimes feel like what I have to say comes last. Whereas in song recitals, having had these two flashes of inspiration, I realised that I can create something that’s autobiographical, that I can express something that is inside me.

● You’re from England now living in Graz after Vienna. Tell us what all of that transition was like. What are some similarities and what are some things that you had to get used to?

I’ve lived in 4 cities in my life: London, Glasgow, Vienna and now Graz. I’ve been really lucky that they’re all very beautiful cities and there’s a lot going on culturally, so I was able to take inspiration from all of that. The transition of moving to another country is always very difficult. Moving to Vienna and learning the language was hard, but it was very important for me that I work on my German, and get it to a really good level, because there’s a certain reputation that first-language English speakers have here in Europe, that we don’t really bother to learn other languages. 

All of those kind of teething problems, when it comes to relocating, are eclipsed by the cultural differences. To the point where, even after four years of living in Austria, cultural references come up all the time that I have to google. I must say though, Austrian culture is probably easier for British people to adapt to than many other countries. Austrian people are generally a bit more direct than British people - it seems like pretty much everyone is more direct than British people - but here in Berlin, for example, the directness feels even more pronounced. I am so accustomed to British passive aggression, that if someone took the word “kind” out of “kind regards” at the end of an email, I would take that as an act of war (everyone laughs). Because Austrians are more likely to tell you more directly how they feel, it really is much healthier, but I still need to remind myself that that cultural directness also gives me permission to be direct too, something I find really difficult!

● You’re someone who I think really embraces all fields of singing, from opera to song to concert. What lets you be that diverse?

I think I just love telling stories. I’m from an instrumental background, so it feels very natural for me to connect with audiences in a concert setting. I love doing oratorio - there’s no staging or costume, but you’re still telling a very intense story. In the last year, I’ve had the privilege of adding both Bach Evangelists to my repertoire, which are very challenging both vocally and dramatically, but the connection with the audience is so intense. Especially singing them in Germany, where they were written, and in the first language of the audience, it can sometimes feel even more gratifying than performing opera. With opera, you’re not singing directly to the audience, that fourth wall is so present, whereas in concert and song, you connect with the audience on such a personal level, that it can be very scary and stressful, but I feel so privileged and grateful at the same time, to be able to connect like that. If someone is willing to trust me to tell such stories, I am never too scared to fall down a few times in the process. I recognise that anxiety sometimes in some of my colleagues who only perform opera rather than concert and song: there’s a fear about being seen making mistakes or experimenting, but if you want to go beyond just one genre, if you feel like you have something to say as an artist across those boundaries, you have to be willing to make mistakes. 

That’s my number one piece of advice for life anyway. I remember I made very little progress in my German for the first three months or so when I first moved to Vienna, because I was so petrified of making grammatical mistakes, that I would rehearse a whole dialogue in my head before I felt comfortable starting it. I think once I realised that no one is actually thinking as much about me as I am about myself, I felt much more comfortable making mistakes and that’s when things started to click, and that applies to speaking languages, being an artist, or just being a person!

● Out of these disciplines, is there anything that makes Song special? Was there an important event that made you fall in love with it?

I guess it’s the recital I mentioned just now that was really that big moment, but living in London played a huge role in that as well. I had access to the Wigmore Hall through their amazing ticket offers for young people, as well as other great venues with a culture for song. Also, we’re so lucky that nowadays, you can go online to listen to all the great artists of the last hundred years, for free! Through song, I discovered a deep love for a way of self-expression that I didn’t quite feel in opera or symphonic music. I was not a naturally brave person, but seeing all the great song communicators express themselves in such a naked way gave me courage to do that myself. I’ve always been a person who takes a lot of inspiration from other people to inform what I want to do on stage.

● The texts we sing as song artists are not libretti, but rather complete works of poems. Would you agree that that makes it almost like a condensed opera?

That’s very true, but I think the form adds a degree of freedom in song recitals that you don’t quite have in opera. In opera, for better or for worse, we are bound to the Fach system. As a tenor, I am usually the young man in love for whom everything works out in the end. I don’t really get a lot of opportunities to be the bad guy, or a more morally complex character. Whereas doing song, I have the chance to tell strange stories that I wouldn’t be able to in opera. I never really connected to the “hopeless romantic who falls in love with a girl and does everything for love” type. I’ve always been more attracted to stories that are more abstract, a little confusing, which is also why I particularly love French song so much. Song really lets me go to that place of telling stories that don’t necessarily always make sense, whereas most of my opera repertoire was about me confessing my love 15 times, which is great in its own way, but having the flexibility to sing about whatever, as well as being able to sing a love song to a man, was very liberating.

Having said that, I think even now, it’s shocking for the audience to see a male singer give a recital with so-called “women’s songs”. I think because there was a tradition in opera of trouser roles (women singing male characters), it’s less shocking for a female singer to sing for example “Winterreise” by Schubert, but if a male singer sang “Frauenliebe und Leben”, they would hear endless well-meaning feedback after the recital that the piece is meant for female singers to sing. But I think even notwithstanding the work that’s still left to be done, there is much more freedom in choosing repertoire in song than in opera, which is an important reason why I love this art form so much.

● I do have to say, even compared to 10 years ago, the trend has been changing. I used to think that every tenor had to sing “Die schöne Müllerin“ and every baritone had to sing “Winterreise”. Nowadays, especially amongst artists in our generation, there is much more freedom in the choice of repertoire. I think people just have to be more open to different views and ideas.

Yes, and people just have to come see it! They can’t make up their minds about a recital before they’ve even seen it.

● Speaking of going to see recitals in person, Do you believe there is a difference in listening to recitals live and on recordings?

Absolutely. There are some voices that are amazing in person but just do not record well, and there are also voices that record beautifully, but can be maybe a bit underwhelming in person. Another problem is people’s expectations: when people listen to something on their phone, there is an expectation that it has been performed in a studio, performed again and again, edited, and therefore, it has to sound perfect. I think I was as guilty of that as anyone else before I recorded my first album. I expected commercial recordings to be absolute perfection, because you have no excuse after days and days of recording in a studio. Then I had to record 34 songs in 3 and a half days. That might sound like a lot of time, but that’s 10 songs a day. And the voice can be cruel in that, certain things just might not work for you on a certain day. I think in live performances, people are more accepting when they hear that a certain part of the voice isn’t sitting great, whereas in recordings, especially online, where things can be said anonymously, people are much more comfortable to be harsh and to compare you to all the greatest performances in the history of music. I did a performance of “Messiah” a few years ago, which was recorded and posted online. It’s got 2.5 million views and there are comments about me saying “how dare that tenor sing with vibrato” and “the tenor is singing notes that aren’t written in the score”, and those few comments make you forget about all the hundreds of positive comments. The one negative comment is the one you fixate on. Usually, these are people who have no direct impact on my life, I don’t know them personally and I probably never will get to know them, and it’s quite bizarre that people like that will dislike your work with such intensity, and feel the need to write something in that public forum, rather than just turning the video off.

● You just had a CD release. You made a fantastic/interesting choice of composer for this. Tell us a bit about this.

So, it’s an album of songs by Florence Price called “Hold Fast to Dreams”. I was approached by the pianist Sascha El Mouissi, with whom I recorded the CD. He had been engaged by a radio company in Germany to make the project, with a singer of his choice. He chose me to be that singer - this was all happening in the month or two right after I moved to Vienna. I got an email from the management of the opera house, saying that this pianist wanted to meet me, and asking if I would go to his house and sight-read some songs. Of course it struck me as a little strange, although I now understand it happened like that to comply with pretty strict Austrian laws about data protection! So I went over to his house and he explained to me what the whole project was about. We read through some of the songs - almost all of them weren’t from published editions: most of them were manuscripts. There was something so special about these songs that immediately caught my attention, some of them are very operatic and grand, but then there’s also a really gentle intimacy at the same time. We spent months reading through all of her non-spiritual works. We managed to narrow it down to the 34 songs that we put on the album and now it’s been almost three years since we recorded, and they are finally out there in the world. It almost feels like giving birth!

● They’re all fantastic songs, but is there one song in particular from the CD that you would recommend people to listen to?

Oh yes. The last song in the album is called “Little Things”, and we put it last because we couldn’t put it anywhere else. It’s like a prayer, but it’s not for the little things, rather to the little things in the world. It’s begging nature for forgiveness. The way it’s written musically is very grand, but it is also so intimate and tender. It has everything that I love about Florence Price. Everyone, go and sing “Little Things”!

● We’ve never spoken about this, but I feel like you have a different perspective to mine when it comes to programming. Tell us a bit about your thought processes you go through when you program. Do they apply for both recitals and CDs?

I think programming is something almost magical. It’s not like practicing singing, where you can sit down and decide you’re going to do it. It has to come from some inspiration. I need an idea to build off of. Together with my duo partner, Dylan Perez, we came up with a program called “Une saison en enfer”, which was inspired by the relationship that Verlaine had with Rimbaud, which only lasted 18 months, but was this kind of torrid, intense, drug-fuelled relationship, so we thought it would make a great song programme. I love doing exactly that: taking something from history and really diving into it. I usually start with one thought like that, then it comes in one of two ways: either I’ll have a moment of visualizing what the musical roadmap has to look like, then I play a sort of sudoku of picking the right songs in the right keys in the right moments. Or, I’ll be doing something very mundane: working out in the gym or getting groceries, and then something will spark my imagination, and I’ll know the whole program immediately. Programming is one of those things you have to be patient with, and wait for the right inspiration to strike. Dylan and I spent a lot of time coming up with “Une saison en enfer”, as well as coming up with a few different versions with different lengths to fit different concert promoters’ needs. I think we spent about a year experimenting with the program before we felt comfortable sending it out into the world.

For a CD, it’s very different. If I’m programming for a live recital, it wouldn’t occur to me to avoid very famous repertoire. I would have no problem performing “Winterreise” live, but I would really have to think about whether it’s necessary for me to record it. The piece doesn’t need me to record it. I think you need to think about the recorded legacy: what repertoire needs someone to record it and spark a little interest? 

I also try to take a lot of inspiration from pop musicians as well, because I really love how they programme their albums. There’s this Charli XCX album called “how i’m feeling now”, the whole thing is a document of a specific emotional period in her life. That kind of radical intimacy is something I think we find more acceptable in pop music as opposed to classical music, and it’s something I find really inspiring. I think that’s really the duty and the privilege of an artist, getting to be so emotionally naked. That’s what I’m trying to do with my next album, whenever it might come: I want to pick repertoire that’s really personal. I guess I’m quite spiritual in that sense: I don’t want to overthink it, but rather let the inspiration come to me. 

● Tell us any line from any song that has a special place in your heart and please tell us why.

I can’t choose between the Florence Price songs, because it would feel like I’m choosing my favourite child. If I had to pick a line out of any song, it would be “Hast mich in eine bess’re Welt entrückt” from Schubert’s “An die Musik”. It kills me every time I sing that line. I think it’s sentimental for a lot of musicians, but I really feel very strongly that all the great things I have in life are there because of my relationship to music. There is an idea of gratitude there that I find very moving.

● What other genres of art interest you other than your own?

Musically, I am drawn into interesting voices of any genre. I love a voice that has a lot of flavor to it. I also like visual arts a lot. I really like René Magritte. I love him for the same reasons why I love French song. It is so abstract that it almost doesn’t make sense. I’ve always been attracted to art that sits on the edge of surrealism, but resists really going there and completely abandoning logic. I think that’s also why I love the books of Haruki Murakami - I’m working my way through all of them at the moment. Throughout the whole book, you expect that all the loose ends will be tied up, but it’s so great that some of them are just left hanging. It’s not really about tying up the story in a neat little bow, it’s more about how a lack of concrete logic can make you feel. I’m also trying to get into film: the classics. I’ve found it quite hard until now to commit to a whole movie, which I know seems strange as somebody who loves opera, but I’m trying to expand my horizons and go through the movie classics. There is no genre of art from which I would automatically turn my head away and say it’s not for me. I think you should try to experience everything that’s out there.

● Now that we’ve spoken about you, let’s talk about our industry. What is a trend that you see in our industry that you are happy to see, and what is a trend that you’re more concerned about.

I really like how the Fach system is becoming more flexible. I think it’s so cool that, for example, this past year Michael Spyres sang Tristan at the Met, but also did a big tour of Händel’s Jeptha with Il Pomo d’Oro. If you have all the notes to sing something, and you can be heard over the orchestra, if you have something to say about it, you should be able to go for it, even if it doesn’t conform to your Fach. I imagine the Fach system is fabulous for casting directors, especially if you’re trying to find a last minute jump-in, but it’s also really cool to give the audience that chance to listen to more than one type of singer for a certain role. 

On the other half of your question, I think the social media-isation of everything is a bit worrisome. The demand on singers to be “on” at all times is so intense, and it’s even harder today with artists having to also be content creators. A lot of people talk about how the golden age of singing is in the past. I don’t agree, and I just wonder if it’s that the great singers of the past were less accessible, less under a microscope, not feeling like they have to announce every rehearsal, every audition on Instagram. I struggle to imagine Maria Callas lying in bed saying: “Chat GPT, write me an announcement of my concert tour with a Disney style cartoon of me on stage”. I just can’t imagine that. I wonder if these personalities seemed much more engaging because of the fact that we just didn’t know so much about who they were behind closed doors. I just wonder if we’re robbing the audience of the opportunity to get to know us over the course of a recital, by sharing our personal lives with the world 24/7. Maybe we’re all giving too much away for free.

● Now we have a less serious question. What would you say is a songbird that represents you?

My apartment in Graz is on the ground floor and there is a big garden just behind it. I usually wake up very early in the morning around 5 or 6 o’clock, open the back doors and get to listen to all the birds in the garden. Listening to the chirping sparrows every morning is so delightful, so I would say a sparrow!

● We’re already at our final question. Is there a question that you’ve always wanted to be asked? Or is there something that you just want to put out there?

Back in my student days, we got a lot of advice at college about really living life and figuring out who we are as people and as artists, but I don’t think I got a grasp of who I am as a person until about 2-3 years ago. Being a singer, it’s not just about your technique or preparing roles. It sounds bizarre to say this, but moving to a different country and going through all the struggles involved in that really made me a much better singer. You need to get out of your comfort zone to improve yourself. Going through a personal crisis, or a horrible breakup, or losing your job - having to pivot does make you a better artist as well as a more well-rounded person. It’s the kind of advice you receive in your early career and think you understand, but also one that you don’t really get until you’ve gained the experience for yourself. For me, it was the combination of moving abroad, learning a new language, and navigating a completely different culture that forced me to figure out what I actually think and feel, independent of the environment I grew up in. And that's when my singing changed for the better too, partially because my technique continued to improve, but more because I finally felt like I had something real to say. Everyone, move to another country! (All laugh)

Find Ted's album "Hold Fast to Dreams - Songs by Florence Price" under the following links: