In 1985, four young members of the Klezmer Conservatory Band traveled to the Soviet Union as tourists and met with refuseniks, most of them Jewish, who had applied to leave and were harassed, denied work, or wrongfully imprisoned. To encode vital information about those people, the band’s saxophonist, Merryl Goldberg, wrote out a musical score assigning letters to notes across several octaves, using sharps and flats to expand the symbols. The resulting sheet music carried street names, landmarks, directions, and contact information, past the KGB. Fake titles like “Mosquito” for Moscow and “Rigoletto” for Riga added cover. Musicians have enciphered names before. Johannes Brahms composed a sextet that hid the name of a lover, and Johann Sebastian Bach used the German note names H and B to form the Bach motif. Goldberg shares her story of Cold War intrigue in a new book, Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB (Bookshop|Amazon), co-authored with Vince Houghton, director of the National Cryptologic Museum at the National Security Agency. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Coded Score That Smuggled Refusenik Contact Information Past the KGB”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grandparent.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I just read a remarkable book.
It’s the true story of a woman who encoded sensitive information during the Cold War – Inside notes of music.
The book is called Notes of How a Quartet of American Musicians outwitted the KGB.
The musicians belonged to the Klezmer conservatory band, and Klezmer, as you know, is the traditional music of the Ashkenazi Jews of Central And Eastern Europe.
And if the name Klezmer conservatory band rings a bell, it may be because you heard one of the group’s many appearances on the old Prairie Home Companion show.
In 1985, four young members of that band traveled to what was then the Soviet Union.
And officially, they were tourists, but unofficially, they were going to several cities specifically to meet refusenics.
Most, but not all of whom, were Jews who’d applied to leave the country and, as a result, were harassed or denied work or wrongfully imprisoned by Soviet authorities.
American activists had asked the band to smuggle information about Refusniks in and out of that country.
That’s when the band’s saxophone player, a woman named Meryl Goldberg, came up with an ingenious plan to create a secret code using musical notation.
So starting with the note A for the letter A, she assigned the remaining letters to notes rising through several octaves, and she used sharps and flats to expand the number of available symbols.
So eventually, she had this written score that looked for all the world like piano sheet music.
But encoded in that music was vital data.
It had the names of streets and landmarks and directions and information about contacting new refusenics.
And she even gave each song a fake title, like the one for the refusenics in Moscow was titled Mosquito, and the one called Rigoletto was all about somebody in Riga.
Now, if you actually tried to play that music, of course, you’d think, Well, that song sounds pretty weird, but it got right past the KGB.
And it turns out that Goldberg is not the first person to hide letters in music because Johannes Brahms encoded the name of his true love in one piece of music, and Johann Sebastian Bach did something similar with the letters of his own name.
Now, you might be wondering, like, how did he do that?
But the trick was that in German musical notation, the letter H stands for B natural, and the letter B stands for B flat.
So he created this famous musical cryptogram called the Bach motif.
It’s really fascinating to read about.
But part of this book read like a spy novel because it is this firsthand account of how frightening it is to be under constant surveillance in a police state and threatened and literally followed everywhere.
It was only for a few days, of course, in Goldberg’s case.
But the book itself is also a moving testament to the power of music shared across cultures, and it’s an inspiring reminder that even small acts of resistance can change lives.
I think you’d like it.
It’s a wonderful sounding book exactly down my alley.
The title and the author again?
The title is Notes of How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB, and it’s by Meryl Goldberg who co authored the book with Vince Houghton, who, as it happens, directs the National Cryptologic Museum at the government’s National Security Agency.
We’ll, of course, link to that on the website.
Martha and I love to receive your ideas about the next book we should read.
You can email them to wordswaywardradio dot org.
