NEC Musicians to Discuss Cold War Spy Mission in NOTES OF DECEPTION

The story of four artists and their musical spy mission is told in Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB.

Margie Apfelbaum moderates a discussion on Thursday, November 5 with NEC faculty member Hankus Netsky and alumna Merryl Goldberg about their Cold War journey.

In May of 1985, four artists with deep ties to New England Conservatory and the Klezmer Conservatory Band traveled to the Soviet Union to meet an ensemble of dissident musicians, including refuseniks, Jews who suffered tremendously under the Soviet regime.

One of the four travelers was NEC alumna Merryl Goldberg, whose new memoir with intelligence expert Vince Houghton, Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB, tells the tale in riveting prose. On Thursday, November 5 at NEC's Brown Hall, she's joined by NEC faculty member Hankus Netsky and moderator Margie Apfelbaum for a discussion of the book and their experiences. The event revisits the musicians' journey, the extraordinary risks they took, and the intersection of music, secrecy, activism, and Cold War history. Admission is free. For more information visit necmusic.edu.

Six months before traveling first to Moscow and then to Tbilisi, Georgia, and Yerevan, Armenia, Netsky, already a young faculty member at the Conservatory, was recruited by representatives from the Waltham, Massachusetts-based Action for Soviet Jewry to gather a few fellow musicians from the Klezmer Conservatory Band, which had formed at NEC, to make the trip overseas.

“By the mid-1980s, NEC had an identity that was associated with Jewish music in Boston. No other school had a scene around Jewish music,” Netsky said. “I was into the cause. I was a musician.”

“The ultimate goal of the trip,” writes Goldberg, “was to meet with (and smuggle out information about) the Phantom Orchestra.”

Ultimately, Goldberg, Netsky, Jeff Warschauer '86, and Rosalie Gerut, a local vocalist who was the child of Holocaust survivors, witnessed Jewish life in the Soviet Union and brought home information about people who desperately wanted to leave the USSR but were forbidden from doing so.

“I came from a family that was very politically active and also human rights oriented,” Goldberg said. Providing support to refuseniks and other dissidents seemed like the right thing to do.

“We were treated to extraordinary KGB harassment and scrutiny,” Goldberg said, “but once we were there, there really wasn't any turning back.” Music, she said, built the muscle of confidence. “Once we were able to make it to the Phantoms, to the folks in Tbilisi, and meet them and start playing music, our courage just exploded, because the people we met were so courageous and were so inspiring.”

Bringing information home from the Soviet Union required creativity, so the quartet of musicians put their knowledge about musical ciphers to work and created a secret cipher system. “Johann Sebastian Bach famously spelled his name in music and embedded it in the 1740s in his Mass in B minor,” said Goldberg. “The idea of music as a code or cipher system has been around for centuries.”

Gerut, Goldberg, Netsky, and Warschauer embedded information like names, addresses, and phone numbers in their sheet music. “All the people in the room experienced the freedom that the music provided,” Goldberg writes.

Once back in the United States, the unlikely spies shared details of their adventure with prominent policymakers like Steny Hoyer and Ted Kennedy and continued to advocate for the rights of the people they met in the Soviet Union.