It’s quite an extraordinary story that Wired tells. That of Merryl Goldberg and three of his comrades from the Boston Klezmer Conservatory Band, who left for Moscow in 1985 with their instruments, accessories and sheet music in their suitcases.
To a simpleton, these were just the classic written transcriptions of jazz or klezmer music. For Goldberg and his comrades, they were much more: documents scrambled in a language invented by the saxophonist to scramble information she didn’t want reaching the KGB thugs who inevitably oversee her escapade in the Soviet republics would .
Because under the pretext of a cultural trip, some interviews and concerts, Merryl Goldberg actually wanted to meet the Phantom Orchestra, a dissident musical ensemble made up of holdouts, Soviet Jews who were banned from leaving the country, Christian activists and secret observers of the proper application of the Helsinki Accords of 1975.
Merryl Goldberg worked covertly for Action for Soviet Jewry, an American NGO dedicated to humanitarian aid in the Soviet republics and the exfiltration of Jews wishing to leave the USSR to emigrate to Israel or the United States.
In short, the American saxophonist had a keen interest in making sure that the details of the meetings planned, the places where they would take place, the information she would convey to the activists, did not fall into anyone’s hands.
So Merryl Goldberg invented a code, a coded language in her music, as she explained at a recent NSA conference in San Francisco, as Wired reports. A clever hack that got through customs before anything else.
“When we arrived we were immediately put aside and they searched our luggage, down to the smallest item, to the point of unpacking the tampax. It was crazy,” the American recalls. “For my music, they opened the notebooks and recognized some genuine pieces. Someone who wasn’t a musician couldn’t tell the difference with the code. They turned each page and then handed the notebook back to me.”
truthfulness
Wired gives some details on how the musician created her cipher. The classical scale, called diatonic, based on only five tones and two semitones, offered too limited alphabetic possibilities. Merryl Goldberg therefore chose the chromatic scale, which offers twelve tones, each separated by semitones.
In order to further expand her very personal alphabet and to increase the authenticity of her scores, the musician sometimes wrote only in the treble clef, sometimes she added notes in the bass clef. The notations, particularly on the tempos and rhythms, allowed her to add the numbers to the information she was trying to quantify. The suitcase was in the pocket, the KGB saw nothing but fire.
“We used this code to take people’s addresses and other useful information so we could find them. And we encoded things on our journey so we could get information out [d’URSS] to the people we wanted to help to leave the country,” the American recalls.
And if the journey of the group of American musicians did not seem easy, the KGB followed its activities very closely in all places and at all times, still managed to meet members of the Phantom Orchestra, exchange useful information for their task, and even some to share impromptu concerts with them, in Tbilisi, in Georgia, or in Yerevan, in Armenia.
However, Merryl Goldberg and his comrades caught the attention of their guards, who arrested them and put them behind bars. “At this point you think you’re going to end up in Siberia or something like that. We were super scared. So we continued to play each other every night. And we played a tune that the Russians loved, but we played it wrong to annoy the young soldier posted outside our door.
The group was eventually expelled from the country and sent to Sweden. Before they were put on the plane, they were searched from head to toe to make sure they didn’t take any secrets with them outside the USSR. But no one paid any attention to the scores Merryl Goldberg had written during the voyage – the sweet music of the mystery.