Singing Like Germans

Regular price €34.99
A01=Kira Thurman
active listening
Age Group_Uncategorized
Age Group_Uncategorized
artistic expression
austro-german blacks
Author_Kira Thurman
automatic-update
Bach
Beethoven
black classical music
Black musicians
black studies
Brahms
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=AVA
Category=AVLA
Category=AVM
Category=JBSL
Category=JFSL
Category=NHD
classical music
classical music and racism
classical music history
COP=United States
cultural assimilation
cultural identity
Delivery_Delivery within 10-20 working days
eq_art-fashion-photography
eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_music
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
global black history
global conversations
interdisciplinary history
Language_English
learned identity
Marian Anderson
musical history
musical interactions
musical tradition
PA=Available
performance art
Price_€20 to €50
PS=Active
public perception
racial and gender categories
racial identities
racism in germany
softlaunch
transatlantic history
transnational collaborations

Product details

  • ISBN 9781501759840
  • Weight: 907g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Oct 2021
  • Publisher: Cornell University Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
Delivery/Collection within 10-20 working days

Our Delivery Time Frames Explained
2-4 Working Days: Available in-stock

10-20 Working Days
: On Backorder

Will Deliver When Available
: On Pre-Order or Reprinting

We ship your order once all items have arrived at our warehouse and are processed. Need those 2-4 day shipping items sooner? Just place a separate order for them!

In Singing Like Germans, Kira Thurman tells the sweeping story of Black musicians in German-speaking Europe over more than a century. Thurman brings to life the incredible musical interactions and transnational collaborations among people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores how people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall.

Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. 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. 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. Audiences wavered between seeing these musicians as the rightful heirs of Austro-German musical culture and dangerous outsiders to it.

Thurman explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it. 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.

Kira Thurman is Associate Professor of History, German Studies, and Musicology at the University of Michigan. A classically trained pianist who grew up in Vienna, Austria, she is also a founder of the website blackcentraleurope.com.