'The Violin Conspiracy': Fiction

What it's like to be a classical musician while Black.

I picked up Brendan Slocumb’s debut novel, “The Violin Conspiracy,” because it’s the current selection of an online book club that I belong to (very marginally). Then The Washington Post chose “The Violin Conspiracy” for its 2022 holiday gift guide.

If you like mysteries but are looking for something different from the usual dead-body formula, this novel might be the answer. Instead of looking for a killer, we're looking for a thief — a thief who steals a rare, multimillion-dollar Stradivarius violin from a gifted young musician who's already had plenty of tough breaks as he strives to make a career out of his passion.

Ray, you see, is Black. The only other person who’s ever really believed in his ability to become a violinist is his grandmother, who passed down her grandfather’s “fiddle” along with her memories of him playing it and her stories of how he learned to play while enslaved as a child.

To nearly everyone else, including most of the rest of his family, Ray has no business anywhere near classical music. His mother tells him to get a real job. An employee in a music shop where he goes to get his violin repaired is openly hostile. When he lands his first paid gig as a teen, playing at a wedding in a schoolmate’s string ensemble, he gets a stunningly racist reception from the father of the bride. As a guest performer with various orchestras, he overhears other musicians dismissing him as a marketing gimmick.

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Reading “The Violin Conspiracy,” I realized I’d had the exact opposite experience of Ray: While he stuck out like a sore thumb, Asian Americans often joke that we all grew up playing either the piano or the violin. My mother insisted that her children take music lessons. I tried the violin first, then switched to the piano. My brother also started on the violin and stuck with it. Though it was obvious early on that neither of us would progress much past our teachers’ recitals, no one ever questioned whether we should be doing what we were doing. That wasn’t the case for Ray’s creator.

Slocumb, a longtime classical musician and educator, drew from unhappy personal experience in charting Ray’s rocky journey. In an interview with Ebony, he cited an oft-quoted statistic from a League of American Orchestras report: Black musicians make up just 1.8% of orchestras in the United States.

“It’s a very sad statistic,” he notes. “I have never understood why that number is so low, because Black musicians are just like everyone else—we can play just as well. We know the repertoire. We have the technique—we do. We're just lacking the opportunity.”

“The Violin Conspiracy” is a lament about that lack. As Ray works feverishly toward his goal of winning one of the world’s most prestigious classical music competitions, he encounters obstacle after indignity after insult, making it seem indeed as if the rest of the world is conspiring against his success.

But the novel is ultimately an optimistic one, with a satisfying solution to the mystery and an inspiring epilogue that together make up the equivalent of a climactic symphonic flourish. Slocumb told Ebony:

Music completes me. It is satisfying in every way possible. It tops off my soul and it's just done so much for me—it saved my life.