Monica Datta’s novel Thieving Sun is a fascinating debut, a book as inventive as it is compelling.
Brandon Hobson wrote of the book:
“Thieving Sun is a highly intelligent, staggeringly inventive novel structured by music scales indicating time, but it’s more than that: emotionally powerful, sad, whimsical, and beautiful, this book is a dizzying delight. Monica Datta is a startlingly inventive writer who has written a moving story of love and loss. Absolutely brilliant.”
In her own words, here is Monica Datta’s Book Notes music playlist for her debut novel Thieving Sun:
Thieving Sun, a story of a woman (Julienne) grieving the composer (Gaspar) who was the love of her youth, began with the image of a person walking a lifelong tightrope or a fine glass bridge at a thirty-to-forty-five-degree angle upwards as well as across a vast chasm, simply to stay alive with little hope and no respite. I, a non-musician, was interested in scales, long ones, across octaves, as a vocabulary. Microtones are the musical intervals that differ from the semitones that make up tuning in twelve-equal-temperament Western music: the human ear can, apparently, detect alone twenty different tones between C and C#. To me microtonal scales have the effect of a tightrope, raising the stakes on the way up or down.
Although most Western music (across genres) uses the 12-TET system, microtones are everywhere, undergirding many musical traditions including the blues themselves: the “blue note” is played or sung a semitone or quarter tone lower than ordinarily anticipated in a song’s scale. In Indian classical music, the shruti was considered to be the smallest gradation of pitch audible to the human ear and corresponds roughly to a quarter tone in a twenty-two-note octave but the intervals are not necessarily equal to one another. Javanese gamelan, the largely percussive orchestral music of East Java (Balinese and Sundanese gamelan are similar), employs two systems of tuning—pélog and sléndro—with seven and five intervals respectively; the effect among instruments and vocalists, which may number as few as five or more than sixty, is harmonious and timeless. The Arabic maqam is a melodic mode that founds composition in the traditional music of that region, with twenty-four tones rather than twelve.
In the end, I wrote the story along ten scales inspired by the 24-TET maqam, choosing to name each for a material that used in the making of art, the waging of violence or both: this allowed me to highlight different aspects of the story and characters throughout the book and also to indicate time; sections marked by “A” notes indicate the earliest points in the story, “G” notes the most recent; half-flats, half-sharps, flats and sharps indicate gradations within time periods. Rather than a table of contents at the start of the book, I decided to include a “Table of Accidents” indicating the musical structure of each chapter named after the accidentals, i.e., the characters that raise or lower the pitch of a musical note in this case quarter- or semitones.
What follows are fourteen pieces of music: seven works that taught me about microtonality and seven songs around which the characters may have grown up and which remind me of them. Largehearted Boy first crossed my path as I was first imagining Thieving Sun: it’s a daydream to write this post, so thank you for this opportunity.
“Dreaming,” Sandro Perri (2003) and “Dreaming (…Again) (2004),” Polmo Polpo
Under the name Polmo Polpo (something to do with the lungs of octopi), Sandro Perri in 2002 released Like Hearts Swelling, gorgeous slabs of what we might have called drone electronica and to me what the 2000s felt like. On Sandro Perri Plays Polmo Polpo, he covered three of the works in folk rock fashion along with two new songs. My favorite of the latter category, “Dreaming,” which sounds like a caustic winter ballad, received the inverse treatment as “Dreaming (…Again),” all bubbly bass and pedal steel.
“Running Up That Hill,” Kate Bush (1985)
The smash hit alike of 1985 and 2022, about two people in love who cannot understand one another, that one might sooner bargain with the gods had they only known what it was like to be them.
“Escape Is at Hand for The Travellin’ Man,” The Tragically Hip (1998)
Named after a fictional band, this song is about the fleeting connections between musicians on tour and based on a true story: the death by suicide of Jim Ellison, the lead singer of Material Issue. Understandable to anyone who has high-fived a stranger and shouted that they ought to hang out some time with heartfelt intent and never do.
“Christiansands,” Tricky (1996)
To me this is like a trip-hop meets Kubla Khan version of “Running Up That Hill” in which two people cannot (maybe literally) understand one another: “It means we’ll manage / I’ll master your language and in the meantime I create my own.”
“River,” Joni Mitchell (1971)
The end of the relationship between Julienne and Gaspar is accelerated when the latter takes an academic job in Los Angeles. He doesn’t think himself one to live in the past but feels just out of place and misses northern winters enough to wish for a frozen river so that he might skate away to the cozy cold.
Krzysztof Penderecki, Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima (1961)
Julienne’s mother insists that she was conceived around a viewing of Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959). It is at least an understatement to call this extraordinary piece of 24-TET music microtonal—please watch this animation of the score—as Penderecki followed a graphical and diagrammatic approach to notation. A threnody is a lament for the dead: he stressed that the work was not composed in response to images of war—as a kind of journalism—but rather dedicated to the victims of the tragedy.
“How to Disappear Completely,” Radiohead (2000)
The first microtonal surprise of the list is this song, from the start of Jonny Greenwood’s compositional career (likely how I learnt who Penderecki was). This video explains it beautifully, but the A half-sharp at the start locates us in atonal deep space before launching the song into a muted beginning that will bloom into its glacial shape; the microtonal string chords on the way out are exquisite.
“These Boots Are Made for Walkin’,” Nancy Sinatra (written by Lee Hazelwood, 1966)
The second microtonal surprise on the list! The famous bass notes that introduce the song step down incrementally: seven half steps divided roughly into sixteen unequal quarter tones. It reminds me of Julienne’s mother, grandmother and the other women of the American West in their lineage who despite their differences may have lent their descendant more spine than she thinks.
“I Can’t Be Satisfied,” Muddy Waters (1941)
The work of Muddy Waters—credited with the origin of Chicago Blues and widely considered the most important blues musician of the later twentieth century—is intertwined with the history of American musicology; the first recordings of his music were conducted in 1941 by Alan Lomax in collaboration with John Wesley Work III for the Archive of the American Folk Song. A relentless song of the Great Depression, “I Can’t Be Satisfied” was one of Waters’ first recordings; in this riff-based composition intervals between notes seem to shorten as they ascend the scale.
“Gendhing Lintang Karahinan (The Morning Star),” Gamelan Orchestra of the Yogyakarta Royal Palace (1997)
There are some muffled jokes in my novel: one is that Gaspar plays gamelan in a trio with violin and cello; this is to say that he is the sole commander of what Julienne refers to as “a hundred gongs” (the bonang) but several other instruments. A Javanese gamelan ensemble normally requires at least five people but better about fifteen and ideally at least fifty, more with vocals: xylophones, metallophones, flutes, strings, drums and gongs including six sets of bonang. Gamelan has been influential on many Western composers, from Claude Debussy to Lou Harrison. The kraton (Royal Palace) of Yogyakarta has more than twenty gamelans of historical significance; this luminous piece is normally played only in the context of the kraton, with a steady and sonorous great gong.
“Enta Omry,” Umm Kulthum (by Mohamed Abd Elwahab and Ahmad Shafik Kamel, 1964)
Himself of Persian and Iraqi ancestry (each with its own respective tradition of maqamat), Gaspar spends many years studying and teaching music in Syria, with a broad interest in the music of the Middle East and North Africa. The Egyptian contralto and songwriter Umm Kulthum had a rapturous global following that included Maria Callas, who called her the “Incomparable Voice.” Written in Maqam Kurd, inta ‘umri translates to “you are my life” and is perhaps Kulthum’s best-known long-song.
“Nigahen Milane Ko Jee Chahta Hai…” Asha Bhosle (by Roshan, 1963)
The title translates to “I want to make eye contact.” This song from the film Dil Hi To Hai is, like many others from Indian movies, based in ragas; this one, in the qawwali style, is based in Kalyan (also called Yaman) raga, one of the first learnt by students of Indian classical music. It’s a sweet and charming song, with jingling ghungroos on the ankles of dancers and the hand clapping characteristic of qawwali.
“Pressentiments,” from Emilie, Kaija Saariaho (2008)
This monodrama for solo soprano by the late Kaija Saariaho with a libretto by Amin Maalouf is an incandescent portrait of Enlightenment heroine Emilie du Châtelet, a mathematician and scientist ahead of her time. Completing a translation of Newton’s Principia, undergoing a pregnancy that she knows will kill her, Châtelet takes us through the whole of her extraordinary life in its last days; marked by translucency, color and microtonal harmonies the scenes in which she depicts her intellectual life are, perhaps in a nod to mind-body dualism, no less passionate or exquisitely rendered than the volatile passages which depict her personal life.
“String Quartet No. 14 in Quarter-tone System, Op. 94: I. Allegro energico,” Alois Hába (1963)
The Czech composer Hába was an early innovator of microtonal music from as early as 1917, innovating quarter-tone pianos, clarinet, trumpet and guitar as well as a sixth-tone harmonium and founding a department of microtonal music at the Prague Conservatory. First acquainted with microtones through Moravian folk music, he was also inspired by Arabic musical traditions as well as the work of his contemporaries. Although he worked in many genres, Habá was most prolific as a composer of string quartets, of which this later work is among the most refined.
Monica Datta received degrees in architecture and urban design from the City University of New York, the London School of Economics, and the Bartlett School of Architecture (UCL), as well as an MFA in creative writing from Washington University in St. Louis, from which she received a Divided City/Mellon Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study segregation in fiction and urban morphology in France, Morocco, and Germany. Her writing has appeared in The New Inquiry, Conjunctions, and many other journals. She teaches at Pratt Institute and the Cooper Union.