Join The New York Times best-selling author and North Carolina native Wiley Cash as he highlights great writers across the state and their work each month. Listen in on conversations between Cash and his author friends as they discuss how North Carolina inspires them on the Our State Book Club podcast.

While Brendan Slocumb’s 2022 debut novel, The Violin Conspiracy, tells the story of a priceless Stradivarius that’s stolen for ransom, his sophomore novel, Symphony of Secrets, released the following year, paints a much broader portrait of theft. Instead of focusing on a single stolen instrument, the novel portrays what happens when a brilliant young Black woman’s entire music catalog is ripped from her. The extent and implications of the theft will stun most readers, but Slocumb says that it’s more common in the music world than one might think, especially for composers of color, many of whom will forever remain unknown.

“You will never, ever hear their names because either the primary composer just decided to take credit or people are just flat-out thieves,” he says. “And it’s still happening today. There are people whose names we’ll never know who have written work that will endure for the rest of history.”

And, believe me, Slocumb knows his music history.

His own artistic story started in Fayetteville, where he fell under the sway of two public institutions: the Bordeaux Branch of Cumberland County Public Library and the string music program at Mary McArthur Elementary School.

“My mom would take my siblings and me to the library every other weekend,” he says. “We would always have books in our house, and we couldn’t return them until we’d read them all. My mom was instilling a love of literacy, and we really didn’t know it.”

Slocumb was much more conscious of how the music program at his school, which introduced him to the violin at age 9, was influencing him, especially because the routine practices and performances kept him out of trouble.

“The friends I hung out with weren’t the nicest people and didn’t have the best intentions,” he says. “And I had music to guide me. I credit the public school music program for saving me.”

Since graduating from UNC Greensboro with a degree in music education, Slocumb has spent more than two decades as a public and private school educator, even serving as an educational consultant for The Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. Over the years, he’s performed with the likes of the McLean Symphony in Virginia and the Prince George’s Philharmonic in Maryland, and he’s served as a concertmaster and regularly performs chamber music.

How can someone so busy making a career in one art form take the world by storm in another? Slocumb credits his willingness to listen to criticism from his editor, his sense of discipline, and his background in music. “I don’t take anything personally, and that helps to influence the direction of my writing,” he says.

And when it comes to doing the work of writing, he relies on the same discipline that he’s refined over decades of daily music practice.

“I’m able to sit down each day and write for a couple of hours,” he says. “It’s just like me sitting down and practicing music. It’s always been a daily practice, whether I wanted to do it or not, whether I felt like it or not. It’s just one of those things that you sit down and do.”

As Slocumb’s careers in music and writing prove, practice does, indeed, makes perfect.

A Stolen Legacy

photograph by Matt Hulsman

Symphony of Secrets careens along two timelines. One is set in 1920s Manhattan and follows a struggling white musician named Freddy Delaney, who can’t seem to catch a break — or a sense of rhythm. But that changes after he meets a Black woman named Josephine Reed, who’s nearly incapacitated by her ability to see and hear music. Delaney concocts a scheme to sell her music under his own name, eventually building a career as one of the most celebrated composers of all time.

The novel’s second timeline is set in contemporary Manhattan, when a Delaney scholar named Bern Hendricks digs into the recent discovery of a lost Delaney masterpiece. Along with a tech-savvy researcher named Eboni, Hendricks travels to Reed’s hometown in Granville County and discovers secrets that change everything about the lives of not only Delaney and Reed, but also Hendricks and Eboni. Symphony of Secrets is a fast-paced performance that will leave readers calling for an encore.

More to Explore: Join Wiley Cash for two special Our State Book Club podcast episodes, including a fall reading preview, on August 6 and 20. Find out where to listen at ourstate.com/podcast.