"Nobody knows what color I am": Time, Music, and Race in Kris Defoort’s The Time of Our Singing (2020)

Abstract

In 2020, Belgian composer Kris Defoort (b.1959) completed his fourth opera, The Time of Our Singing, based on the homonymous novel by Richard Powers (2003). This article proposes to examine how race and racial identity are represented in Defoort’s opera, how it differs from the novel upon which it is based, and how it contributes to (de)colonializing opera. After summarily commenting on three of the central themes in Powers’s novel, the adaptation of each of them in Van Kraaij’s and Defoort’s opera is analysed. It appears that Defoort’s opera carefully proportions the themes ‘time’, ‘music’, and ‘race’, and in so doing achieves a remarkable balance between its characters, a certain realism and objectivity in the manner in which the story is told, and artfully conveys a feeling of standstill of time, a stagnation despite the passing of more than half a century of (racial) history.

Furthermore, by analysing the Belgian racial context that preceded the opera and the reactions of the European press that followed it, this article places the opera itself on the ‘arrow of time’. Finally, the question of entitlement or ownership is addressed; The Time of Our Singing answers this question from within.