Book Review: THE TIME OF OUR SINGING by Richard Powers

The Time of Our Singing by Richard Powers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

"In the only world worth reaching, everyone owns all song."

This, beyond doubt, is Richard Powers' masterpiece. I've read six of his other works, including "the more famous ones," and while I have a few more left to go, I can't imagine anything beating the scale of this one!

This impassioned reader stayed up late on a school night, weeping over the ending of this miracle of paper and passion, this transcendent piece of art that challenges the very fabric of time itself.

Richard Powers, a Caucasian man, just wrote the definitive book about growing up labeled "black" in America during its most violent civil rights movements. But like any Powers book, its themes are polyphonic: on the politics of race, of music, of the soulless machine that is the record music industry, of authenticity and identity, of freedom in all its forms. It's also a history of Western music condensed and described with a pen so skillful, it makes me hold my breath after reading passages of piercing beauty.

To gatekeep Richard Powers and question the legitimacy of his masterpiece is to question the legitimacy of brown Filipinos and yellow Asians studying the rich cultural heritage of white Europe: thousands of years of classical music history, from organum to opera, hemiolas to hiphop.

This novel, in a word, is "operatic." It's so operatic, the opera of the book premiered in Belgium only in 2021!

"What’s music, that anyone should wreck their life over it?”

In 1939, the famous African-American contralto Marian Anderson sang at the Lincoln Memorial Center and made history.

In that crowd of thousands, a German Jew and an African-American woman are brought together by destiny. (Or a mind-boggling, time-defying physics of their own making.)

He's an amateur musician turned physics professor ("Science was his way of lengthening his shortened days."). She's a soprano studying to be a future Marian Anderson ("Crisis brought out her art."). Their love, and their children, defy so many of society's silly rules.

"Maybe we sing for ourselves. At least that. Nothing without that. But nothing if only that. We need a music that sings to anyone. That makes them sing."

To "keep afloat that feather on the breath of God," Richard Powers challenges all of us (musicians and non-musicians alike) to keep singing the song of our existence. Joyfully, no matter what, because "you can only be what you sing."

I'm typing furiously over my hastily eaten breakfast, as if to exorcise this book from me just enough so I can go to work and function like a normal human being.

But I know I'll never be the same.

Some books are signposts in life. Yesterday was before "The Time of Our Singing." There is today, and a more beautiful tomorrow, because of it.

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