And that's the book called Singing Like Germans. Sometimes, a book comes along that completely breaks new ground?a total eye-opener. Filled with compelling accounts of the contradictions inherent in classical music's universalist claims, Singing Like Germans demonstrates that the lives of Black classical musicians cannot be reduced to a narrative of struggle. Thurman's exacting research, synthesizing a kaleidoscope of source material, paints a rich portrait of Black classical music-making in Europe spanning well over a century. This book will be fascinating to a wide body of readers who are interested in classical music, German history, and African American history. Singing Like Germans is a superb piece of historical research enlivened by its author's deep fascination with her subject matter.

An interdisciplinary and transatlantic history, Singing Like Germans suggests that listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial and gendered categories are constantly made and unmade. Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it. While Germans and Austrians located their national identity in music, championing composers such as Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as national heroes, the performance of their works by Black musicians complicated the public's understanding of who had the right to play them. Yet on attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity is not a biological marker but something that could be learned, performed, and mastered. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.

Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century.

Singing Like Germans by Kira Thurman