“Singing Like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms” with speaker Professor Kira Thurman (University of Michigan), comments by Professor Lauren Stokes (Northwestern University), and chaired by Professor Chad S.A. Gibbs (College of Charleston, Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies)
Singing like Germans: Black Musicians in the Land of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms investigates the history of Black classical musicians in German-speaking Europe across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A study of musical interactions and transnational collaborations between Black performers and white Germans and Austrian listeners, the book explores the tension between the supposedly transcendental powers of classical music and the global conversations that developed about who could perform it.
Singing like Germans reveals how listening to music is not a passive experience, but an active process where racial categories are constantly made and unmade.
Singing Like Germans won the 2022 George L. Mosse American Historical Association Book Prize.
Sponsors: George L. Mosse Program in History, UW-Madison Department of History, UW-Madison Center for European Studies, and the College of Charleston Zucker/Goldberg Center for Holocaust Studies