Racial erasure and exploitation drive Symphony of Secrets

Symphony of Secrets

Brendan Slocumb

Anchor

Imagine the most influential piece of modern American music — a tour de force spanning classical, opera, Indigenous, Latin, folk, jazz and blues — was not, as claimed, the work of a white man but stolen from a homeless Black woman with a mental disability. Such a theft, and the public deletion of its true creator, would be a powerful illustration of the exploitation of marginalized artists. That's the premise of musician Brendan Slocumb's absorbing new novel, Symphony of Secrets, a fast-paced detective adventure. It features a contemporary classical-music scholar who gradually discovers the long-hidden truth inside a cryptic archive; woven through is a subtle but important message about racial erasure in American music history.

At the centre of the story is Bern Hendricks, a music professor at the University of Virginia who has worshipped the renowned composer Frederick Delaney since he was a poor Milwaukee kid who studied violin through Delaney's philanthropic foundation. Years later, after a long-lost section of the composer's masterpiece is discovered, Bern is tapped by the foundation to prepare it for performance.

Giddy and star-struck, Bern initially comes off as a near-caricature. To help him analyze the precious score's two discrepant versions, Bern enlists the wisecracking, decoding mastermind Eboni Washington, who digitizes and cross-analyzes all the musical data. As they scrutinize the material, they notice everywhere a curious abbreviation, JOR, along with complex configurations of geometric shapes and cryptic pictographs.

What appear to be only obsessive doodles turn out to be the basis of an elaborate musical notation system invented by Josephine Reed, a destitute genius Delaney meets at a jazz club in the early 20th century. Lacking talent himself, Delaney invites the homeless Josephine to stay at his apartment and teach him her secrets on the piano. He soon realizes fame awaits if he can coax her into writing songs for him. Over the next half-decade, she produces brilliant genre-fusing pieces he sells under his name, justifying the deception by attaching his pedestrian lyrics and rationalizing that no one would buy music written by a Black woman. It's a long-standing American story of racist expropriation masquerading as benevolence.

Delaney, Bern and Eboni are all entertaining, but Josephine emerges as singularly intriguing. Her debilitating mental struggle is the source that fuels an inexhaustible creativity. Though Josephine's mindscape is fascinating, Slocumb doesn't quite succeed in taking us inside it. The conventional narration he gives her barely suggests a kaleidoscopic mind's sensory magic. Slocumb seems less interested in psychological probing than a steady-paced adventure.

Amid the heart-racing plot, Symphony of Secrets is ultimately an affirmation. Music has historically been the country's ethnically richest art form, embodied in the multicultural story of jazz and in today's cross-fertilization between popular genres. That process has been marred when the powerful extract from the powerless. Josephine Reed's restoration speaks back to such exploitation. Shaping her vast array of colours, ciphers and traditions, she's a seamstress of the torn national fabric.