Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
References for this paper are not available at this time. We will be adding them shortly, thank you for your patience.
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 of the American Musicological Society – University of California Press
Published: Dec 1, 2022
Read and print from thousands of top scholarly journals.
Already have an account? Log in
Bookmark this article. You can see your Bookmarks on your DeepDyve Library.
To save an article, log in first, or sign up for a DeepDyve account if you don’t already have one.
Copy and paste the desired citation format or use the link below to download a file formatted for EndNote
Access the full text.
Sign up today, get DeepDyve free for 14 days.
All DeepDyve websites use cookies to improve your online experience. They were placed on your computer when you launched this website. You can change your cookie settings through your browser.