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Richard Powers’s novel The Time of Our Singing (first published 2003) is a fictional prose narrative about the musical careers of two brothers of African-American and German-Jewish parentage in a social context affected by racial issues in twentieth-century USA. The novel explores music in terms of cultural and political appropriation and demonstrates, in the laboratory of fiction, the extent to which racial prejudice influences the use of and attitudes towards musical conventions. While, at the level of fabula, the musical careers of the two brothers are predestined to failure by their refusal to comply with ingrained social mores, the novel, at the level of sujet, nonetheless problematizes the notion of music as a pure social/cultural construct and, with the tragic plot, presents a case in favour of music as a redemptive aesthetic force transcending historically determined realities. This is brought about by a richly suggestive discourse full of descriptions and metaphors evoking inherently musical values.

The Cultural Validity of Classical Music in Richard Powers’s The Time of Our Singing