Description:
Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Note on Translation -- Introduction -- Part I 1870–1914 -- Chapter 1 How Beethoven Came to Black America -- Chapter 2 African American Intellectual and Musical Migration to the Kaiserreich -- Chapter 3 The Sonic Color Line Belts the World -- Part II 1918–1945 -- Chapter 4 Blackness and Classical Music in the Age of the Black Horror on the Rhine Campaign -- Chapter 5 Singing Lieder, Hearing Race -- Chapter 6 “A Negro Who Sings German Lieder Jeopardizes German Culture” -- Part III 1945–1961 -- Chapter 7 “And I Thought They Were a Decadent Race” -- Chapter 8 Breaking with the Past -- Conclusion -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index
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 between people of African descent and white Germans and Austrians. Through this compelling history, she explores the ways in which people reinforced or challenged racial identities in the concert hall. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, audiences assumed that the categories of Blackness and Germanness were mutually exclusive. Yet upon attending a performance of German music by a Black musician, many listeners were surprised to discover that German identity was 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 these works by Black musicians complicated their 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