The Time of Our Singing

The Easter Sunday Concert

On Easter Sunday 1939, Marian Anderson — barred from performing at Constitution Hall by the Daughters of the American Revolution because she was Black — gave a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial to an audience of 75,000. In the crowd: David Strom, a German Jewish émigré physicist, and Delia Daley, a Black woman from Philadelphia. They meet. They marry. They have three children.

The novel follows the Strom children — Jonah, David Jr., and Ruth — through the decades that follow. Jonah becomes a classical tenor of astonishing ability, performing in the great concert halls of Europe and America, trying to inhabit a musical world that is theoretically raceless. His brother David accompanies him. Their sister Ruth becomes a civil rights activist who regards their choice as accommodation.

The Musical Argument

Powers’s argument — rendered through music rather than stated — is that music offers a version of human experience that exceeds racial category, but that this version is purchased at a price. Jonah’s art is real; his ability to exist in it without engaging the social history of his body is not.

The Time of Our Singing is Powers’s most personal novel — he has spoken of his own mixed-race family background as partial inspiration — and his most emotionally direct. It is also among his longest. The musical renderings — of Bach, Handel, Britten, American spirituals — are technically accurate and genuinely moving.

What Distinguishes This Book

Among the qualities that set The Time of Our Singing apart: The musical detail is extraordinary — Powers’s knowledge of classical and vocal music permeates every scene; The racial history of America from the New Deal to the Civil Rights era is rendered through specific lives rather than abstraction; and Jonah Strom is one of the great portraits of artistic genius in American fiction. These strengths are evident from the first pages and sustain across the whole work.

Themes

The thematic concerns of The Time of Our Singing give it weight beyond its surface narrative. Music is the art form most able to transcend racial categories — and the novel tests whether that transcendence is real or wishful thinking. The attempt to live beyond race in mid-20th century America was not delusion but necessity — and its costs were borne by the children. Genius in music is both a gift and a category that removes its possessor from ordinary human life. These ideas emerge from the texture of the work rather than explicit statement, which is the mark of ambitious fiction done well.

The Writing

Richard Powers’s prose in The Time of Our Singing is the vehicle through which the book’s ideas travel. The style is calibrated to the subject — neither more ornate nor more stripped-down than the material requires. This kind of precision is less common than it appears, and it is one of the reasons the book repays re-reading: there is more in each page than a single pass recovers.

Limitations

The length (631 pages) demands sustained engagement. Some readers find the physics metaphors that Powers weaves into the narrative more distracting than illuminating. These are worth knowing before starting, though they are unlikely to diminish the experience for the readers the book is written for.

Who This Is For

Readers of ambitious literary fiction and anyone interested in the intersection of music, race, and American history in a multigenerational novel.

Publication and Richard Powers’s Career

The Time of Our Singing was published in January 2003. The novel is Richard Powers’s most expansive: spanning roughly sixty years of American racial history (from a 1939 Marian Anderson concert at the Lincoln Memorial to the aftermath of the 1992 Los Angeles riots), it follows the Strom family — a German-Jewish physicist, a Black singer, and their mixed-race children — through music and racial identity in 20th-century America.

The 1939 Marian Anderson concert that opens the novel is historically accurate: the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to let Anderson, the most celebrated American contralto of her era, perform in Constitution Hall because she was Black; Eleanor Roosevelt arranged a concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, attended by over 75,000 people. The image of a mixed-race couple meeting in the crowd of that concert establishes the novel’s central argument about art, race, and American identity.

Powers received a MacArthur Fellowship (the “genius grant”) in 1989. His novels consistently work at the intersection of scientific inquiry and humanistic concern: earlier works addressed artificial intelligence (Galatea 2.2, 1995), genetics (The Gold Bug Variations, 1991), and neurological disease (The Echo Maker, 2006). The Overstory (2018), his most commercially successful novel, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

The novel’s centrepiece — Marian Anderson’s Easter Sunday concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939, before 75,000 people, after the Daughters of the American Revolution refused her Constitution Hall — is one of the defining episodes of 20th-century American cultural history; Powers described it as “the founding myth” that the novel’s three generations were built to illuminate.

The Marian Anderson Concert

The 1939 Marian Anderson concert on the Lincoln Memorial steps — attended by 75,000 people after the DAR refused her the Constitution Hall stage — is the novel’s founding myth and returns as a reference point across three generations. Eleanor Roosevelt, who resigned from the DAR in protest and arranged the Lincoln Memorial concert, appears briefly; Powers uses her presence to establish that individual moral choice within institutional failure can still produce moments of historical consequence.

Final Verdict

Our rating: 4.1/5 — Powers’s most emotionally direct and socially engaged novel. The musical sections are among the most accurate and affecting in American fiction, and the racial history from 1939 to the 1990s is rendered with genuine complexity.