Performances + Events
Nineteen eighty-five was “the year of the spy.” Tensions between the United States and Soviet Union were high, and any thaw that might mark the end of the Cold War seemed like a distant possibility, if it was a possibility at all. Espionage was the worrisome intrigue of the day.
That May, four artists with deep ties to New England Conservatory traveled to the Soviet Union to meet an ensemble of dissident musicians — including refuseniks, Jews who weren’t allowed to emigrate from the USSR to Israel and suffered tremendously under the Soviet regime.
“The ultimate goal of the trip,” NEC alumna Merryl Goldberg ’81 writes in her recently published memoir, “was to meet with (and smuggle out information about) the Phantom Orchestra.”
Notes of Deception: How a Quartet of American Musicians Outwitted the KGB (Hanover Square Press, 2026), a book coauthored by intelligence expert Vince Houghton, reads as much like a spy novel as it does the memoir of a conservatory-trained saxophonist.
Six months before traveling first to Moscow and then to Tbilisi, Georgia, and Yerevan, Armenia, NEC alumnus Hankus Netsky ’76, ’78 MM, 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 to make the trip overseas. The KCB had been formed in 1980 in NEC’s Brown Hall after Netsky promoted Klezmer jam sessions in the pages of Genesis 2: An Independent Voice for Jewish Renewal.
“By the mid-1980s, NEC had an identity that was associated with Jewish music in Boston,” Netsky explained. “No other school had a scene around Jewish music.”
Netsky said, “I was into the cause. I was a musician.” He was also someone who sought (and still seeks) to “connect with the souls of our ancestors” and wanted to “see what that was under communism.”
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 in a recent interview. Providing support to refuseniks and other dissidents “seemed like an important thing to do.”
That doing required dealing directly with the KGB.
“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,” Goldberg said.
Getting information out from the Soviet Union — which was of tremendous importance because, Goldberg explained, “the more the West knew about (the dissident musicians), the more protection they would have, essentially, from the KGB” — required creativity.
“We needed a secret cipher system,” Goldberg writes in Notes of Deception.
“I learned about interesting musical ciphers while in college at the New England Conservatory,” Goldberg writes. “Johann Sebastian Bach famously spelled his name in music and embedded it in the 1740s in his Mass in B minor. … The idea of music as a code or cipher system has been around for centuries.”
Indeed, Netsky said, hiding codes in notation is part of “musical tradition.” That the KGB didn’t have anyone looking for what could be hidden in plain sight, in the musical notes themselves and in performance indications, was a “huge oversight.”
Gerut, Goldberg, Netsky, and Warschauer embedded information — names, addresses, and phone numbers, mostly — in their sheet music, emboldened by the bravery to which they bore witness and the strength all involved got from making music together.
“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 such prominent policymakers as Steny Hoyer and Ted Kennedy, and continued to advocate for the rights of the people they met in the Soviet Union.
Goldberg grew quite a bit on that trip in 1985, saying, “I think we all learned from each other what magic music can have under dire circumstances.”
Decades later, not far from the School of Arts at California State University San Marcos, where she’s on the faculty and founded Center ARTES (“an organization dedicated exclusively to arts education and arts integration in K-12 schools”), Goldberg walked into an opportunity to share details of that 1985 trip to Moscow, Tbilisi, and Yerevan.
Talking with a group of cybersecurity experts at a party in La Jolla, she said, “I have a story. …”
Goldberg and Netsky will tell that story together, in a conversation moderated by Margie Apfelbaum, on Thursday, November 5, at 8 p.m., in Brown Hall, where, in 1980, their adventure essentially began.
