Behind the Ivory Veil
5 Hoosier Connection
Sunday, 22 May 1955, Indianapolis, Indiana
DOC AND MARGARET boarded a train to Chicago with Milton’s notes safely tucked between them. The Chicago tickets, purchased by William the day before their departure, would postpone anyone following them at least a day. If they were lucky, it would send someone ahead of them to Chicago. When they arrived in Fort Wayne, Indiana, they got off the train. Wesley Allen was waiting to pick them up. The meeting was warm and cordial.
The three-hour trip from Fort Wayne to Wesley’s home in Indianapolis was spent discovering more about each other. Wesley taught courses in piano, music history, and musicology. He was engaged to be married, but they were waiting until Rebecca had finished her Master’s in Sociology. Wesley’s undergrad minor had been in New Testament Studies and he was reasonably fluent in both Greek and Latin. He was, as Margaret had guessed, a Methodist.
After they defined their goals for the visit in terms of learning about music as it relates to classic literature and Wesley had given them a quick rundown on his work in the area, they retired for the night. Wesley’s hospitality was impeccable. He insisted that Doc and Margaret stay with him in spite of their prior hotel arrangements. They would meet again after Wesley finished his instruction in the morning. He would bring Rebecca with him to lunch if they didn’t mind.
Monday, 23 May 1955, Indianapolis, Indiana
When Doc and Margaret arose in the morning they found a continental breakfast had been prepared for them with a note indicating where the nearest restaurants were and what numbers called cabs. After looking at the listings and directions, the two decided to spend the morning preparing for their interview with Wesley.
“How shall we get around to the sources for his research?” Doc asked Margaret. “We need to be discreet. If he knows more than we do, we could be endangering our purpose.”
“I suggest that we be totally honest with him. I don’t mean to say that we should tell him the entire purpose of our visit up front, but tell him that we are very interested in his method of notation and how he arrived at it. We might even indicate that we had seen some similar notations before. Either he will withdraw, in which case we are better not to attempt to push him, or he will respond with the same candor. He seems to be thoroughly familiar with us and our work.”
“That is what I was worried about. Do you suppose that he already knows about the place? Let’s go take a look at Wilton’s manuscripts to see if he left any notes here that may have been found.”
Margaret was agreeable and when they reached the college library, they were led up a back stairway to “the stacks.”
“This is where the old papers are kept,” the student librarian rambled on. “We don’t have as great a facility for keeping things in good condition as we should. This building is newer, though, and it’s a lot better than when the library occupied a couple of rooms over in the Administration Building. We really needed the space.” She ran on and on, seeming never to get to the point of the papers that Doc and Margaret were after. “The papers came over here in boxes and have never been unpacked. Before that, they just sat in stacks on the shelves. I guess that’s why we call this area the stacks. Here we are.” She finally came to a steel shelving unit with boxes stacked on it. “Benjamin Wilton. Everything should be in this box. I hope that you find everything that you want. If I can do anything for you, just let me know. There’s a new phone system connecting the stacks with the desk. It’s right over there. Don’t forget to let me know when you are ready to leave. I’ll have to come back up and lock the doors.” She finally left.
Doc and Margaret went to work immediately. They began sorting and ordering the papers as best they could.
“It looks as if the papers were packed into this box in a hurry. No particular order at all.”
“True, but at least they don’t appear to have been rifled and repacked,” Doc said.
“Do you really suppose they just picked up stacks of paper from shelves and put them in the boxes? There isn’t even a catalog number on the papers. Oh, look!” she said, holding up a couple sheets from her stack.
“Music of the Gods?” Doc said. “Look at the notes. The same hieroglyphs that are in Wilton’s papers and at the City. He didn’t even finish it. Broke off in the middle of a sentence. That’s strange.”
“Or else a page is missing.” Margaret looked at Doc. Both seemed to know already that they would find the missing page or pages in Wesley’s possession.
“It’s time for our luncheon. We must take a good look at this young man.” Heinrich loaded the papers back into the larger box as Margaret called the librarian and she dutifully locked the doors behind them—and talked all the way back downstairs to the main floor.
“That girl should consider a career other than librarian,” Margaret laughed as they left the building.
A young woman was putting dishes on the table when Doc and Margaret reached Wesley’s home. They were all startled to see each other when the two came through the door unannounced.
“Excuse me,” the young woman said at last. “Wesley said that we would have guests for lunch, but I guess I expected you all to arrive at once. Please come in.”
“We arrived last night but went out for a walk this morning. You must be Rebecca. I’m Margaret Jacobsen and this is Phillip Heinrich. You have a look about you that has told me already that we are going to become very good friends.”
Rebecca laughed and greeted Margaret warmly. “When Wes told me he was picking up Doctors Heinrich and Jacobsen, I thought you’d both be men. I’m so glad I was wrong.”
“If you will excuse me,” Doc broke in, “I will go wash up before dinner. You obviously have a great deal in common to talk about.”
“Oh, Phillip. You are such a martyr.” Doc grinned at the women as he left the room. “Now, Rebecca,” Margaret continued, “tell me about your work. What Wesley described was so interesting.”
“My master’s? It’s a sociology degree. I’m all but thesis. It’s a study of the Coexistence of Matriarchal Thealogy and Patriarchal Theocracy in Western Societies.”
“Do I interpret you correctly in saying ‘goddess worship’?”
“Wesley would kill me if I put it that way,” responded Rebecca. “But yes. There seems to be quite a lot of evidence that even into modern times some forms of that cult held sway in certain western civilizations long after the people had officially been Christianized. It is difficult here in Indiana to find adequate resources, though.”
“You realize, don’t you, that most Westerners term that witchcraft? Now it’s not so poorly viewed in many Eastern cultures.”
“Wesley is nervous enough about my dealing with the subject. Please don’t use that term in his presence. He’s so conservative. And now…” Rebecca took a deep breath. “I’ve been awarded a fellowship for the summer at Edinburgh and he’s not very happy about my going off alone. It will delay our wedding until fall instead of June as we had planned. I think he’s also a little jealous, though he wouldn’t admit it.”
“Rebecca, I think we might be good news for you—in more ways than one.” The front door opened and Wesley hurried into the house as Doc came downstairs.
“Ah, I see you have all met already. I’m sorry to be late at my own dinner party. A student had an urgent problem with Liszt.”
“A dedicated teacher. That’s a good sign,” Doc said. “And it did give at least two of us a chance to get to know each other.”
“Well, I’ll have lunch on the table in a minute. I have everything we need in the Frigidaire.” Wesley returned with a platter that revealed not only salad, but a substantial portion of cold cuts as well. The meal was light and friendly and by the end, all felt much more at ease. There was a short pause in the conversation as each finished coffee or crackers. Rebecca was the first to break the silence.
“Well, I suppose that you have some important matters to discuss. I’ll clean up the dishes and make coffee if you’d all like to go into the living room.”
“Thank you, Rebecca,” Wesley said.
“Nonsense,” responded Doc. “Wesley told us some very fascinating things about you in the car yesterday. I’d like to ask you some questions also. Can’t we all share a hand in cleaning up and then gather for the mutual benefit of all our educations?”
Margaret winked at Rebecca who smiled back. It was agreed upon over Wesley’s objections over asking guests to clean the table.
“One thing I’ve learned while on digs and expeditions is that everyone needs to contribute to the menial tasks or we can’t work together on the major ones,” Doc said. “I’ve become an accomplished dishwasher after nearly forty years in archaeology.”
They settled into comfortable chairs in the living room with a cup of coffee each.
“Now, tell me, Rebecca,” started Doc. “You are working on your Master’s, isn’t that right?”
“She’s really got it pretty well under control already,” said Wesley. “It won’t be long after this summer, will it, darling?”
Rebecca made an effort at a smile. Doc turned to Wesley and raised an eyebrow. It was a look that Wesley had used himself when a student got out of hand. He shrank back in his chair.
“What I wanted to know, Rebecca, was the subject of your thesis. It is in Sociology, is it not?”
“Yes, sir.” Doc’s glance at Wesley had cowed Rebecca a bit as well. “The subject is the Coexistence of Matriarchal Thealogy and Patriarchal Theocracy in Western Societies.”
“Goddess worship,” muttered Wesley low enough not to draw a reprimand from Doc.
“Have you explored the origins of this coexistence? You know, total matriarchy versus total patriarchy? The primitive versus the contemporary?”
“Oh yes, Doctor Heinrich. It seems to broaden the subject too much to deal with in one thesis. Much of the available resource material focuses on the supplanting of matriarchy by patriarchy, not their coexistence. Do you agree?”
“I do, but I wanted to make sure that you had explored the subject. Goddess worship, as your fiancé has referred to it, takes many forms and is still practiced in many countries where men sit in parliaments and women practice spells to increase the harvest or keep the children safe. I would like you to visit an acquaintance of mine before you complete your work if it is possible.”
“I’m going to Scotland for the summer to finish writing my thesis at the University of Edinburgh. I leave in two weeks.”
“Splendid,” Doc smiled. He scrawled a name on a piece of paper and handed it to Rebecca. She looked puzzled.
“Mrs. Weed? How do I find her?”
“I will write to her. She is one of the few genuine goddess worshipers that I know. You needn’t find her; she’ll find you.”
“Thank you,” Rebecca said hesitantly.
The conversation continued on the discussion of primitive culture until Doc and Margaret had carefully bent it back to Wesley’s topic.
“Do I understand from our previous conversation that you can make a literal translation of ancient languages into music?” Margaret asked. She made it sound like Wesley’s paper was a natural complement to Rebecca’s research.
“Well, Doctor Jacobsen,” Wesley began, relieved that it was Margaret asking the questions instead of Doc, “there seems to be a middle ground between translating and interpreting. Usually, when a musician interprets a story into music, he translates his own feelings about the work rather than letting the language itself speak through the music. I think that I have devised a method of letting language speak through the medium of music, though that was, of course, beyond the scope of my paper.”
“Explain a little about the difference between translation and interpretation if you would, Wesley,” Doc said.
“Well, a translation would imply that it was like a code and certain notes or combinations of notes meant certain specific things. Music has both dimensions. A above Middle C is a constant of 440 Hertz. It makes no difference what instrument it is played on, the entire orchestra tunes to A440 as played by the concertmaster. But when you stop to think about it, the note sounds different when played on a bassoon versus a violin versus, God forbid, a horn,” explained Wesley. “Of course, the human voice is also an instrument and may display an entire range of tonality.”
“So, the frequency is the translation and the voice is the interpretation?” Doc asked.
“Somewhat more complicated than that, but it is an illustration. When someone speaks to you, you don’t see words in your head. What you see are visual images that are triggered by the words. The entire concept of the musical language, if you call it that, is that it may be possible to trigger the same images consistently if the right sounds on the right instruments were played. So, there is not so much a grammar as a conceptualization. Keep in mind that the parameters of experience also govern a person’s vocabulary of images just as it governs in part our vocabulary of words. But in the primal area of the mind, the universal consciousness, if you will, there must be a key to language that cuts across experience, culture, and time. It is a return to the Ideal as Plato calls it.”
“I take it then,” said Margaret, “that there is no direct key for the translation or a direct tonality. A equals A, etc.”
“Sequence, rhythm, and pitch all have a bearing on it. For example—and please understand this is strictly a hypothetical situation—if playing the sequence of notes A, C, F, A-prime as quarter notes meant ‘I am going to the store,’ A, C, F, B-prime might mean ‘No man is an island.’ And then if you changed from uniform quarter notes to a sequence of quarter, eighth, quarter, sixteenth, rest, you may have changed the meaning to say, ‘God is the source of all good gifts.’ There may, of course, be another completely different meaning if one changed from playing the notes on the piano to the violin.”
“It sounds incredibly complex as a language,” said Margaret.
“If you look at the music as a literal tongue, it is. But it is merely a medium for projecting images. It has no grammar as we understand the word in English.”
“So how do you make a translation?”
“Just as certain graphologists have succeeded in reading character traits from a person’s handwriting, I have attempted to read emotional image from handwriting or whatever text I have in front of me. Those images inspire certain note sequences, if you will, which can be understood on an image-for-image basis. Creating a notational system that would stand independent of both the music and the image was the hardest part.”
“Have you tested this?”
“Yes. We’ve used two test groups. Rebecca is quite fluent in German, a language that I have no familiarity with at all. We enlisted the aid of the German professor here at ICC. Our first experiment was to distribute texts of a German manuscript to two groups of Intermediate German students. The control group was given their normal classroom environment in which to translate the manuscript. The experimental group was assigned a room adjoining the choir rehearsal space in which I was seated at the piano playing my ‘interpretation’ of the manuscript. Across the board, the students in the experimental class delivered more complete and accurate translations of the work. I say that it was more complete and accurate in that the translation was more as a German would speak the sentences and not that it was more technically perfect. The control group had more perfect word-for-word translations. But the experimental group showed a higher level of interpretive sophistication.”
“But can it be repeated?” Doc asked. “The scientific method requires that the same steps be used in multiple experiments to yield the same results.”
“We pretty quickly used up our quota of German students here. We’re a small school,” Wesley laughed. “But I believe you are asking two questions. First, can I repeat the same sequence of musical notes and second, will the result be the same? The answer to the first is that I have recorded the music and each time I have played it, it has been identical. This is made possible by a form of notation that I devised to match images to music, though it seems to work marginally better if I am playing the music than if the students are listening to the recording. I don’t believe that recorded music ever has the quality of a live performance and our equipment is not studio quality. Since we ran out of German students, we repeated the exercise with non-German-speaking students—a senior creative writing class and a freshman English comp class.”
“I’m not sure I see the point,” Doc said. “You can’t have had English students giving the same translations as the German students, can you?”
“No, not at all,” Rebecca answered as Wesley drank his tepid coffee. “We’re still a little new at setting up control experiments, but I saw an opportunity for a short sociology paper on the effect of music on creativity. It was startling. While out of a group of thirty students we received thirty different subjects and styles, each was marked by the same sequence of visual images.”
“And those, as Rebecca pointed out to me, were the same as the major visual images in the translations by the German students.”
After several hours of sharing ideas and seeing some examples of how the method worked Doc was convinced that J. Wesley Allen would be an invaluable aid on the expedition. Doc held a copy of Wesley’s notations for the experiment in front of him, the symbols on the sheet looking so familiar from Wilton’s writing.
“Wesley, I find your discovery exciting and your evidence, though not completely orthodox or conclusive, is compelling. But you have not mentioned anything about the development of your system of notation as was shown in your published paper and here in your notes. While I am convinced that you have the intelligence to develop the theory on your own, a notational system like this must have had some inspiration.”
“Doctor Heinrich,” Wesley straightened himself to the question. Doc sat back, certain that he was going to hear of a dream of some sort that inspired Wesley to create signs and symbols. “I have never been asked that question before and have always been thankful for that. I am afraid that no one would believe me.”
Here it comes, Doc thought.
“When I came to ICC three-and-a-half years ago, I found a scrap of paper stuck to the shelving in my office. Apparently, it had been there for years and was embedded in the shellac. The symbols that I have used were written on it as well as some other notes about language and music. All very short and very cryptic. Something about it fascinated me so much that I just sat and stared at it for hours at a time. The symbols kept burning into my mind as a key to that picture language. I have never known where the paper came from nor who wrote it, so I have never quoted it as a source. It has been more of an inspiration. No one ever thought to ask me about it before now.”
“And you never investigated who had the office before you and what work they might have done on it?” asked Margaret.
“Oh, yes. I asked the professor who had the office before me. He said he had never heard of such a thing. He had noticed the scrap of paper stuck to the shelves and went on a diatribe about the inadequate job our maintenance people do at cleaning rooms up. Prior to him the room had been a storeroom.”
“Can you show us the mystery shelf?” asked Margaret.
“Oh yes,” Rebecca said. “It’s still in his office under some books.”
“Uh, yes. Of course,” stammered Wesley. He seemed reluctant to show them the notes, but agreed. Wesley led them out of the house and back to the campus music department, housed on the third floor of the Administration Building.
“The music department has never been too big here and focuses on training choir directors and church pianists,” he explained. “But we are growing.”
“This is where the old library was, isn’t it?” asked Margaret.
“That was before my time, I’m afraid. I know it was in this building, though. Almost everything was.”
He led the way upstairs to his office. After unloading a shelf, he pointed to the paper, embedded in shellac, just has he had said. Doc and Margaret examined it carefully. It was the missing page from Milton’s notes. To Doc and Margaret, it made little more sense than the first pages had. But this scrap of paper had been adequate to open an entire vista to Wesley. Doc turned to Margaret and she nodded.
“Wesley, in this city of yours, what would you say was the best restaurant?”
“The what?” Everyone laughed at the sudden change in Doc’s tone and attitude.
“The best restaurant in town. When one makes a truly great discovery, one must celebrate in an appropriate fashion. Now surely there is something in this town that will match our level of enthusiasm.”
“Do you really think my discovery is that significant?” Wesley was beginning to smile.
“I think that your gift for interpretation is beyond doubt a unique talent. I want to celebrate our discovery of you. We have business to discuss tonight and it will take us a while to get dressed for dinner. I suggest we get started.”
“I suppose the best restaurant is The Seville on the Circle. But they do serve alcohol. I don’t usually go to restaurants like that.” Wesley was almost blushing at the revelation that he was a teetotaler.
“If it’s the best, Wesley, it is the best. Because they serve it doesn’t mean that you have to drink it.” Wesley called for reservations from his office and the four left to change for dinner. Wesley stopped on the steps of the Administration Building to have a word with Rebecca as Doc and Margaret went on ahead.
“What do you make of that?” he asked her, looking after the two doctors.
“Of what?”
“The way they just moved in and took over. They don’t want to celebrate my discovery, but theirs.”
“Their discovery of you, Wesley. What more do you want?” Rebecca was becoming irritated at Wesley’s demand for attention.
“I want some answers,” he responded.
“Wes, relax. Just go along with them until they’re ready to tell you. They’re not going to hurt you.”
“I don’t trust them.”
“Did it ever occur to you that they might not trust you, either?” Rebecca turned away and went home to change for dinner. Wesley walked glumly behind Doc and Margaret.
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