you know, i was just wondering about the theme/motif of music in solla solla solla if you perhaps by any chance had anything you wanted to say about it
Oh god YES you absolute angel thank you for giving me an excuse to talk about this!
So in Solla, there is this rather quiet throughline that Kinger and Ragatha's relationship is music. They are melody and harmony. They fit together in a way the rest of the characters cannot quite understand, nor fit into because adding another tune can ruin the chord.
There is the main example of this, the little tapping pattern they've had since day one (shave and a haircut / two bits!), but the language used to describe their dynamic outside of that is often based in music too. They're a call and response, a first and second bar, proposition and resolution. There were a few times where I described their dialogue to each other as "cues," as if these exchanged words are more lyrics or notation than conversation.
If you've noticed as well, this thought is being echoed in the chapter titles! All of which are in relation to music and sound: tautophony - the repetition of a sound; monophony - a single unaccompanied melody; polyphony - multiple individual melodies in relation to each other; anthrophony - a sound generated by a human voice; cacophony - multiple clashing sounds.
I knew I wanted their relationship to feel melodic, almost intuitive, like they both know the song but one of them forgot the words. Music was the way to express this because music in real-life can bypass degenerative memory conditions like dementia. The synapses that create your music taste fire off when your listen to music you like and can actually bring people back into lucidity (temporarily) while and after listening.
And even more important than that, music cannot be described. Not like other art forms can. If someone is telling you about a song, your first instinct is to ask "how does it go?" because words do not accurately explain what music feels like when listened to. It just isn’t possible to describe a song well. You can’t replicate it without starting to sing.
Kinger and Ragatha have gradually they've lost the exact pitches they're supposed to be hitting and are just going through the motions. There is wink to this fact in chapter 5. Caine calls the group "ghost notes" as a nickname. In music, ghost notes are these guys:
They are notes that have a rhythmic value but no pitch. Notes you don't actually hear, but feel percussively, almost as reverberation. The music of this friendship has become a collection of ghost notes. They are beats without pitch. This is a centerpiece of their relationship in the prose/ subtext.
(There's an earlier draft of this where I wanted to specifically compare them to Tartini Tones, but found it was too dense of a metaphor to really work, so I'll explain it here instead. A Tartini Tone is the effect of two or more notes being played simultaneously that results in additional notes being audible as well despite it not being played. It how your headphones produce low sounds despite the speakers being technically too small to do so. I thought this was an interesting way to have Queenie and other ex-circus members reverberate in their relationship. Their two notes produces phantom notes that used to be here. But I realized it would require me to explain hertz and psychoacoustics and harmonics blahhhh blah. I ain't doing that lol)
And then there is Pomni. Who really wants to know what is happening here but cannot figure it out for the life of her. There is a moment in the fourth chapter that presents as a throwaway joke, but for this motif and her inability to crack the case, is very important. She is having a moment to reflect on how nice being able to decompress a bit and begins comparing the process to tuning an instrument before interrupting herself with: "What the fuck was she talking about? Pomni didn't know anything about music."
And this is true! Like, she very literally knows nothing on the subject. But she also knows nothing about Kinger and Ragatha. They are music, and Pomni knows nothing about that. Despite all her dots and lines, despite the itch, despite the data points and eavesdropping and detective, she does not know music. She cannot calculus her way through a sonata (though the theme of math and emotions is also related to this!!). She more than once notes Ragatha tapping Kinger’s hand but she doesn’t know it is a song, let alone know it is incomplete. Kinger has not responded to that call in a long time.
Music is fundamentally something you experience. Even if you're sight reading, it simply is not the same as hearing the piece articulated out loud. Not that she could sight read anyways.
But the point is: she was never there to hear this song. She doesn’t know how it goes and cannot know until someone sings it for her. But the person who was all melody has already forgotten. All that’s left are ghost notes and a harmony line, decontexulized.
