![]() ![]() ![]() Thurman researches-and celebrates-Black cultural history in Central Europe as both an academic and a public historian. ![]() Thurman’s reframing of the Beethoven question isn’t just an intellectual one-off. Maybe focusing on whether Beethoven was Black misses the point, Thurman argues, when there are already so many Black composers and performers, past and present, whose work and genius have been entirely overlooked by arbiters of the classical music canon. Thurman’s response, which went viral, addresses the nature of the question about classical music’s selective cultural memory, rather than supplying a definitive answer to the question about Beethoven’s race. ![]() “I’d love to read through the original 18th century sources again and examine the question, ‘Was Beethoven Black?’ But trust me when I say that there are still plenty of Black musicians for us to study-and celebrate!-anyway,” Thurman wrote on Twitter. But when someone on Twitter asked if anyone with classical music expertise could answer, Kira Thurman, assistant professor in the Departments of History and Germanic Languages and Literatures, weighed in. Black scholars in the United States approached the question decades ago. The question of whether Beethoven was Black is not a new one. ![]()
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