Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms

Abstract

Classical music is universal, or is it? Kira Thurman’s Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms reveals how the answer to this question depends on who is listening, who is performing and even who is mediating classical music performances. Thurman sets the musical record straight on the German classical repertoire, unmasking the persistence of racial thinking and racism that pervades music discourses and informs the reception of black musicians’ performances in predominantly white spaces throughout Central Europe. In the reception of their concerts and acts, black musicians are either whitewashed—they are perceived as not so black after all—to assimilate them into a constructed elite white European and, more specifically, German national culture, or they are rendered naturally talented with their abilities deemed a product of their race and racial history. As such, Thurman examines how black musicians’ performances resonate with white listeners who espouse the universality of German classical music, while they simultaneously engage in processes of gendered racialization that have their roots in colonialism, nationalism and biological racism. Race, despite claims to the contrary, is at the very heart of the reception of black musicians’ performances of German classical music throughout Central Europe, and it is documented in reviews that render the sound of singers’ voices in colour (blue, black, brown) and that use language to naturalize their talents as something inherent or even primitive.