Edward Lowinsky's six-week sprint to finish his dissertation before leaving Germany in July 1933 is now musicological legend. Three years later he published the project in a similar rush when his advisor Heinrich Besseler warned him of an incoming edict forbidding the granting of doctoral degrees to Jews. In the thesis lies the germ for Lowinsky's controversial Secret Chromatic Art. His theory posited that in the second half of the sixteenth century, a small contingent of northern musicians with radical Protestant sympathies wrote pieces that appeared on the surface to set texts and use diatonic melodies condoned by the Church. Beneath that compliant surface, however, lurked secret chromatics and seditious meanings that remained hidden from the eyes and ears of the Inquisition. Describing moments of extreme dissonance, Lowinsky wrote the following words in his dissertation: