5.15.09 (if you would like to consult the doctor, click here) subscribe
"Musical Ghost Hunters"
Dear Dr. Rhythm,
I have heard about a person who could talk to dead composers' ghosts and actually transcribe their music. Is any of this true?
--TR
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Dear TR,
Amazingly, yes most of that is true. Her name is Rosemary Brown, she died in 2001. She was allegedly a school kitchen assistant in South London. During the 1960s she became known to be contacted by long-dead composers (decomposers as we like to call them) such as Franz Lizst, Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Claude Debussy to name just a few. It is alleged that she was told by the spirits or ghosts of these composers what to write on the sheet music.
Even more compelling, Brown was not a musician herself. She claims to have had only a few years of basic piano and couple of trips to the opera. However, her incorporeal body of work consists of about one thousand pieces.
There are critics however. Many people believe that she faked these compositions, supposedly implying she lied about her musical experience. Whether that is true or not the pieces she wrote down are quite compellingly in the style of their collaborators. There is a documentary about Rosemary Brown on the Romana-Hamburg site, http://www.romana-hamburg.de/RosemaryBrownE.htm, as well a CD is available with these works.
Many experts have remarked that the stylistic detail is remarkable saying things like, "A lot of people can improvise, but you couldn't fake music like this without years of training." (Richard Rodney Bennett) She apparently performed this act for the BBC in 1969. Sitting on a piano bench she waited for Franz Liszt to arrive, and eventually Liszt did show up (he was often late when he was alive.)
Perhaps she was a master con-artist, but it is a remarkable story and if these are fakes, they are the most impressive fakes I have seen.
