Affective Spaces: Migration in Scandinavian and German Transnational Narratives by Anja Tröger (review)

As a scholar of the Holocaust and contemporary antisemitism, I personally see a counter-narrative within Thurman’s work, one that highlights a “trade” of sorts between America and Germany, with German Jews coming to America and becoming leading composers and scholars in Hollywood, Broadway, and the academy, and African Americans engaging in the inverse and finding their success in Europe. At the core of all of this is the systemic discrimination that drives our colonial heritages. Thurman’s work is especially timely when music academics such as Philip Ewell and Justin London consider the current state of our field fraught with questions of music theory’s “white racial frame,” gender, and race. In Justin London’s recent article in MTO: A Journal of the Society for Music Theory, “A Bevy of Biases: How Music Theory’s Methodological Problems Hinder Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion” (March 2022), he asks how we can expand the canon while simultaneously avoiding tokenism and a rhetoric of “exception” or “uniqueness.” Thurman’s historiography is one answer to this question: demonstrating that history has a bountiful number of examples that, on their own, exhibit the “qualifications” deemed necessary for access into the canon. A “great” composer’s work is only as good as its performance (yes, contrary to long belief). The Black classical musicians that Thurman showcases are just a few of the strong individuals who conveyed musical greatness, a greatness that defied the systemic challenges with which their own country continues to affront them. To quote Thurman, “[Singing Like Germans] encourages us to consider what happened when Black classical musicians defied [white] expectations, to linger in those moments when [Black classical musicians] sang music that did not supposedly ‘look like them,’ when they performed brilliantly and under considerable scrutiny” (18). Kathryn Agnes Huether, Bowdoin College