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

Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman Reviews Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiii, 351 pp. In the 1967 American film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the actor Sidney Poitier plays a successful Black doctor who wishes to marry a white woman from a wealthy San Francisco family. When the father of Poitier’s character angrily tells him that he is making a terrible mistake, Poitier delivers one of the most poignant lines in the film: “You think of yourself as a colored man; I think of myself . . . as a man.” These words spoken by the character Dr. John Prentice, a famed WHO doctor, delivered marvelously by the late Bahamian-born actor, aptly capture much of the thrust of Kira Thurman’s book Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. With directness, accuracy, and sincerity, Thurman presents the stories of several Black classical musicians—conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—who left the racialized barriers they experienced at home in hope of finding an appreciative audience in German-speaking lands. Here, in the “land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,” as Thurman explains, art music was a cherished cultural http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Journal of the American Musicological Society University of California Press

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

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Publisher
University of California Press
Copyright
© 2022 by the American Musicological Society. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press's Reprints and Permissions web page, http://www.ucpress.edu/journals.php?p=reprints.
ISSN
0003-0139
eISSN
1547-3848
DOI
10.1525/jams.2022.75.3.599
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Reviews Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, by Kira Thurman. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2021. xiii, 351 pp. In the 1967 American film Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, the actor Sidney Poitier plays a successful Black doctor who wishes to marry a white woman from a wealthy San Francisco family. When the father of Poitier’s character angrily tells him that he is making a terrible mistake, Poitier delivers one of the most poignant lines in the film: “You think of yourself as a colored man; I think of myself . . . as a man.” These words spoken by the character Dr. John Prentice, a famed WHO doctor, delivered marvelously by the late Bahamian-born actor, aptly capture much of the thrust of Kira Thurman’s book Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms. With directness, accuracy, and sincerity, Thurman presents the stories of several Black classical musicians—conductors, instrumentalists, and singers—who left the racialized barriers they experienced at home in hope of finding an appreciative audience in German-speaking lands. Here, in the “land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms,” as Thurman explains, art music was a cherished cultural

Journal

Journal of the American Musicological SocietyUniversity of California Press

Published: Dec 1, 2022

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