As a Black British opera singer, I am used to being a rare breed – still. Moreover, I am accustomed to having quizzical glances cast in my direction, as if I am something of a novelty or a curious anomaly. A large part of my musical career to date has been based on balancing and reconciling the tricky dichotomy of otherness in relation to myself and the canon of western classical music that I love and love to perform. And given that they are so few and far between, representations of people who look like me in the classical canon have always been of interest. As a student of opera, I clung to the album covers of the African American soprano Leontyne Price and a black-and-white postcard portrait of the Black British composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. These totemic images, my superheroes, became talismanic, protective figures when I found myself on the receiving end of everyday racism from fellow musicians – things like “You’re the whitest Black man I know,”, or “Your performance was so good, I thought you were a white singer blacked up,” or “You would have been a slave when this opera was written.” Or the time a singing coach put her finger in my mouth because she just didn’t understand how I, “a Negro,” could have an alveolar ridge.
