Review: SYMPHONY OF SECRETS

Dr. Bern Henricks, PhD is one of the preeminent experts on the famed 20th Century composer, Frederic Delaney. When Dr. Hendricks receives a call from the Delaney Foundation to authenticate and transcribe a long lost and now found Delaney opera, "Red," he is thrilled. But with the help of a tech-savvy friend, Eboni, Bern soon finds out the truth is more complicated than he thought.

In the early 1920s Fred Delaney, a low-talent musician, met a musically talented Black woman, Josephine Reed, after she critiqued his piano playing in a jazz club one night. He asked if Reed would give him lessons to improve his playing and a friendship, of sorts, developed between the two. Reed, a neurodivergent woman, had an uncanny ability to translate the sounds she heard into music, which she wrote in her own made-up script. When Delaney learned of her unusual talent he badgered her to allow him to translate her songs into proper musical notations and then he added some lyrics. He sold the first song for ten dollars and published it in his name. This was the beginning of a very lopsided musical partnership.

Knowing nothing about this "partnership", Bern and Eboni start to investigate the "Delaney Doodles" on the "Red" score. They compare these doodles to those found on papers in a truck of Josephine's things. The light dawns that Delaney may not have been the composer they thought he was and he may have had help from an unacknowledged source. Around the same time the Delaney Foundation starts to hound and harass the experts causing them to abandon their project and run for their lives.

The Symphony of Secrets is a gripping mystery written by an author, Brendan Slocumb, who clearly knows music. He is a composer and a conductor, skills that translate well into writing mysteries. "His mastery of pacing and tempo and his natural sense of when to soothe the audience and when to jolt them out of their seats are on full display" (Cole). Everytime Dr. Henricks described something musical in the book, I could tell the writer understood his subject and it was so much more interesting and captivating than receiving information about music the author learned by looking something up first.

The story 

seamlessly jumps between Bern and Eboni’s present-day pursuit of the truth and Delaney and Josephine’s tragic story from decades before. Although the mystery is taut and the characters engaging, what makes the book sing is how it makes audible the chords that echo between present and past, coming together to create a consonant harmony. The way Josephine, a disenfranchised Black woman, has her innate talent used and abused under the guise of “being helped” by Delaney is a counterpoint to Bern’s slow and demoralizing realization that the foundation sees him as nothing more than a means to an end. Both believe their pure love of music will allow them to soar, and both end up smashing painfully into the glass ceiling of white supremacy (Cole).

Symphony of Secrets has a satisfying, if not improbable, ending. It is followed by an author's note where Slocumb asks his audience to ponder the probability that this kind of thing happened a lot in our past. Black authors, musicians, artists having their works diminished or appropriated by Whites. And now their works are lost forever to time. Perhaps it is still happening today. 

Rating: 4.5 stars

At 448 pages in length, Symphony of Secrets was my 6th book read for Big Book Summer Challenge, completed the last day of the challenge, September 2nd.

-Anne