66 pages • 2-hour read
Symphony of Secrets
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Symbols & Motifs
Colors and Synesthesia
In the chapters written from Josephine’s perspective, Slocumb describes how Josephine experiences the world, for she describes music using colors. For instance, she describes part of a song that Delaney’s band plays as “the green with the star” (147). Delaney notes that she has green leaves in her hair when she says this. She also experiences music as textures. One example of this is when she describes music by stating that the “blue willow was gritty and sandy” (407). Organizing colors in relation to one another calms her during her panic attacks. At the beginning of her breakdown in Ditmars & Ross, she simply lists the colors orange, black, and green. However, when Delaney gives her music, she adds prepositional phrases: “orange is in the black and green” (197). Adding this grammatical structure helps her to regain a sense of peace and control.
Josephine believes that music should have many different colors in it. She thinks that people “love music because it has all colors” (449). Furthermore, she composes operas about the colored rings of the Olympic flag. When Delaney takes her to the Olympic Games, she is inspired by the “five interlocking colored rings—blue, yellow, black, green, and red—symbolizing the five contents on a white field” (416). The flag’s colors become the operas titled The Rings of Olympia (417). Red is the opera that Josephine hides before her death. When it is discovered in an elevator wall nearly a century later, Red brings her authorship to light and brings Bern to the project. However, this symbol is developed in Josephine’s perspective more than in Bern’s.
Josephine’s Compendium
An important set of symbols can be found in the unique musical notation system that Josephine creates and uses. These have a “bewildering design of curved and straight lines, geometric shapes, dots, and dashes” (268). At first, Bern and other musical scholars assume that Delaney drew these symbols himself, and they are called the “Delaney Doodles.” However, Eboni uses computer models to study the doodles, and when she decodes them, she discovers that they represent Josephine’s music. Significantly, Delaney never becomes fully fluent in her idiosyncratic language, and his inability to translate it and realize her music in its entirety symbolizes his fundamental mediocrity compared to her superior, innate musical talent. Within the Compendium, information about how to play a note, as well as the note itself, is all “packed into one little symbol” (292). The Compendium’s symbolism represents Josephine’s original music, as well as her records of the music and sounds around her. Josephine creates the Compendium to process the way she sees the world and to balance the stresses of her neurodivergence.
Clothes
Clothes also play an important symbolic role in several distinct ways. At the beginning of the novel, Bern is a sharp dresser, and Eboni “always tease[s] him about his penchant for well-ironed shirts” (62). When he is surprised by the Delaney Foundation’s invitation, he worries that his jeans make him “seriously underdressed.” His propensity to be a snappy dresser becomes a symbol of who he is. When he goes on the run and wears “faded clothes from a local thrift store—he wasn’t even sure he was himself” (473). Bern prefers to project a professional identity through his wardrobe.
Clothes take on a far different meaning later in the novel. When Kurt hires police officers to jail and assault Bern, they come to his house when he has just gotten out of the shower and is only wearing a towel. While Bern talks to the officers in this vulnerable fashion he admits that “[h]e’d never felt so naked, so exposed” (438). For Bern, removing his clothes is like removing his identity. Furthermore, the police’s refusal to allow him to get dressed is an act of racist violence that emphasizes The Effects of Individual and Institutional Racism.
Champagne
The first line of the novel includes this symbol. The Overture (or Prologue) begins with the sentence: “Sixteen hours before his death, Frederic Delaney realized that he’d left his Hutchinson champagne stopper at home” (3). The mystery of the second champagne glass that he always has in his dressing room before a performance is eventually solved by Bern and Eboni. Delaney puts out the extra glass to cope with his guilt for murdering Josephine. While his status as a murderer is unknown, the champagne appears to represent what it usually does: a moment of celebration. Later in the novel (but earlier in the chronology), when Delaney sells Josephine’s song, he gets “a bottle of champagne [...] he didn’t have the fancy crystal, but just you wait” (210). This passage is an example of foreshadowing, for it isn’t until the end of the novel that the second, darker symbolism of champagne is revealed.
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