Ghost sonatas: channelling new works by dead composers
ALAN MURDIE takes his seat for a concert of music from the spirit realm
‘“Music is in the air”, said Sir Edward Elgar, “music all around us, the world is full of it and—you—simply—simply—take as much as you require”. He put out his hand in a gesture of capture.” ( Sir Edward Elgar (1904) by RJ Buckley).
At the time Elgar spoke thus there did not exist the constant flow of broadcast, streamed and piped music that envelops us today, nor the vast quantities of recorded music accessible from various formats, playable or downloadable at the press of a key or the click of a mouse. From his words, Elgar appeared to imply music existed outside the self, waiting to be tapped by sensitive individuals. One person whose life seemed to illustrate exactly such a conceit was the medium Rosemary Brown (19162001), the subject of a play The Lambeth
Waltz by David Thurman, broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 26 October 2017. Billed as a comedy featuring “the psychic dinner lady from Balham to whom some of history’s greatest composers dictated music from beyond the grave”, it was a dramatised account of her remarkable story.
From 1964 Rosemary Brown claimed to be channelling original musical compositions from the post-mortem personalities of Liszt, Beethoven, Bach, Brahms, Schumann, Schubert and Brahms to Debussy, Rachmaninov, Stravinsky, Gershwin, and (after 1980) John Lennon. She made numerous recordings and wrote three books on her experiences. During the 1970s and early 1980s she became internationally famous, with performances of these works in London, New York and around Europe. The music she created seemed well beyond her limited musical knowledge and talents and exactly how it was produced has never been explained.
Thurman’s play was based on the idea that after her second book she was being pressured by her publisher into writing a further more sensational volume, with a cynical professional ghost writer (an obvious pun) to produce the text for her. The hired writer is sceptical of her psychic gifts but sees a commercial opportunity if the book is unashamedly populist, recommending she should claim to be channelling the recently murdered Beatle John Lennon rather than long-dead classical composers. The writer is left baffled and perplexed by her serious response that this could prove difficult and that approval is needed from her principal guide, the discarnate Franz Liszt (1811 -1886). The play then switches to imagined and sparky dialogue between her and the waspish spirit of Liszt, who does not respond well to the prospect of channelling new work from the spirit of Lennon. Though lighthearted in approach, the play did not seek to ridicule Mrs Brown, presenting the communications as she claimed on occasion to hear them.
The play also prompted an item on BBC Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour the same day about Brown, including an interview with her son Tom. The view that Brown’s mediumship was to be taken seriously was expressed by many in the past who encountered her in person, witnessed her peculiar talents and studied her music. Many critics were genuinely puzzled, even if they rejected the idea of her being directly inspired by dead composers. However, from her tone of suppressed incredulity, it seemed the presenter of Woman’s Hour found this just all too astonishing for 10.30am broadcasts, though an archive clip revealed a far more sympathetic interview had actually been conducted with Brown on the programme long ago.
As I have previously remarked, modern Radio 4 programmes are generally rather disdainful of ghosts and mediumship, usually eschewing any serious treatment. The fact that women report more psychic experiences than men is a phenomenon that typically goes unremarked on Woman’s Hour, which is altogether far more comfortable dissecting current political, gender and feminist issues than exploring any notion of female communication with the dead. Whilst in the last four decades
certain feminist scholars have done much original and significant research into the history of girls and women involved with spiritualism, enigmas such as Brown and her the 30-year-long musical mediumship appear to constitute an embarrassment.
Born Rosemary Dickeson in Balham in 1916, Rosemary Brown spent her early life there, the daughter of working class parents. According to her autobiography, from childhood she yearned to pursue music and ballet, but like many individuals born in that era she was held back by lack of funding and circumstances. The only unusual thing in her life was a series of odd psychic experiences, including seeing ghosts. Aged seven she saw an old man with white hair and wearing a black cloak appear before her. He did not give his name but stated that when in mortal form he had been a composer and pianist. “When you grow up I will come back and give you music”, he declared before vanishing. Sometime later she saw a photograph of the composer Liszt as an old man and recognised him as her spectral visitant.
The family had a piano at home, and as she grew up her mother struggled to pay for a few lessons from a man who served as the pianist for local ballroom dancing classes. Whilst a schoolgirl, she worked running errands to pay for a few more lessons with a music teacher at Tooting Bec and with a licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music. She learned about musical theory, scales and key signatures, but this was interrupted by World War II. After this she took a few more piano lessons while employed as an office worker, but these ended on marriage in 1952. Unfortunately, her husband’s health was poor, and from then on, particularly following his death nine years later in August 1961, her life was a struggle to hold together their home and bring up the children, a boy of eight and a girl of four. Their family had always been poor and things were looking grim. However, as she was coming out of her grief she sensed that the composer Liszt was coming to her, though she was unable to see him.
In 1964 she suffered two cracked ribs and during the course of convalescence occupied her time knitting and reading. One day she decided to amuse herself on
“When you grow up I will come back and give you music,” Liszt declared before vanishing
LEFT: Rosemary Brown shown going into a trance state. BELOW: The longdead Franz Liszt, who first appeared to Rosemary when she was just seven. her mother’s old piano. Suddenly, she became intensely aware that Liszt was standing in front of her and guiding her fingers across the keys. She began playing wonderful music without effort, music that she could not recall ever having heard before. This experience was repeated over several dreamlike afternoons and she began writing down the spontaneous compositions. Then Liszt began to talk to her, providing the name of each composition, putting the individual notes into her head or guiding her hand on the keyboard. She would then laboriously take them down, note by note. From this began her extraordinary career as a scribe for some of history’s greatest composers, which continued through into the mid-1990s.
Encouraged by the spirits to make her role known, she attracted a number of influential supporters and was prepared to be filmed and undergo testing. Receiving funding from a special trust established by Sir George Trevelyan, she took the opportunity to throw herself wholeheartedly into writing down the music dictated to her. Hundreds of musical scores were produced in over a dozen different composing styles as the number of claimed deceased communicators expanded. The most striking of this growing flow of material was put into wider circulation, leading to public concerts and professional recordings. Throughout her career she insisted the music came not from herself but from the discarnate composers using her as their amanuensis.
There were sceptics aplenty and newspaper music critics wagged their heads. For example, Dennis Matthews in
The Listener (26 June 1969) described her as “delightfully frank and humble”, but raised a number of technical reasons, such as mistakes in the niceties of her musical grammar, suggesting that the music came from her own subconscious self. The general view was that the music was notably inferior to the best produced by the various composers when they were on Earth. But a 1969 item called Grübelei (meditation), partly created under the watchful gaze of BBC reporter Peter Dorling and a television studio crew, impressed at least one critic, being described as “a most spectacular and unusual piece. It
has strong harmonies, cross-rhythms and occasional instructions in French – a point conferring authenticity, but difficult to fake.” The composer and Liszt specialist Humphrey Searle said: “We must be grateful to Mrs Brown for making it available to us. It could well be something that he would have written had he lived another two years.” To have written the
Grübelei implied not only a knowledge of Liszt, but also the ability to see the direction his music was moving at the time of his death.
A concert at the Wigmore Hall by her of some of the compositions in 1971 generated sardonic comments by music critics from broadsheet newspapers such as the Daily Telegraph and the Times. But there were others who were fascinated by her. Pianist Cristina Ortiz found one Chopin piece “absolutely incredible”, while the composer Richard Rodney Bennett said, “You couldn’t fake this music.”
What impressed all who met her was her straightforward sincerity and modesty, even shyness about her gifts, along with what was actually observed when the process of dictation was happening. Altogether, the general consensus was that while the music was not up to the standard of that written by the composers concerned when alive, it was of a far higher quality than could be expected even from somebody with considerably more musical training than she had ever received. Professor Ian Parrott of the University of Wales wrote, “I am quite happy to accept the utter genuineness of the phenomenon of Rosemary Brown”, and he later produced a book, The Music of
Rosemary Brown (1978), which declared his support. Brown herself published three books, Unfinished Symphonies (1971),
Immortals at my Elbow (1974) and Look Beyond Today (1986). When she died in 2001 aged 85, she belatedly received several positive obituaries in the national press.
On one level Rosemary Brown might seem a modern example of how, as feminist scholars have argued, mediumship may provide a means of empowerment for socially oppressed women. From a gender and feminist perspective, in 19th and early 20th centuries Spiritualism elevated women to positions of relative importance and authority. At a time when women were treated socially as second-class citizens and in England still referred to as the chattels of their husbands, Spiritualism provided a means of reversing such power imbalances. Successful female mediums were revered, exercising power and influence, freed from overt male control. Speaking on behalf of the dead was a way of asserting power personally and collectively in a patriarchal society; any inappropriate behaviour could be blamed upon the spirits. (For example, in the case of ‘George Yeats’, wife to poet WB Yeats, it has been postulated she faked thousands of pages of trance scripts to keep her older husband interested in her (See George’s Ghosts: A New Life of W.B. Yeats, 2000, by Brenda Maddox).
This perspective is a most interesting one and has stimulated recovery of much valuable information on the lives of female mediums from historical obscurity. However, the closer one gets to these subjects and their utterances, the greater the problems that arise for this perspective, whenever the question of the reality of their experiences is considered. Claims of being literally possessed by socially conscious spirits, or spirits of any sort at all, are ones which many social scientists (and media commentators deriving their opinions from them) cannot stomach. By applying materialist paradigms, spirits must be rejected a priori and interpreted as evidence of something else. Marxism, structuralism, mainstream psychology, Freudian orthodoxy and post-modernism – all influential in social science discourse – have no place for the reality of spirits and psi-phenomena. Admitting to their possible objective existence would be to erode the intellectual foundations upon which these perspectives are based.
Such a position can also make the claims of mediumship unpalatable to feminist scholars, many of whom admirably champion women’s rights and seek to redress historical injustices. For if the claims of spiritualistic phenomena are false – which materialist ideologies dictate they must be – then logically it means women mediums were telling lies, just as many men at the time accused them of doing, and that for generations female mediums have been perpetrating monstrous and cruel frauds, exploiting the bereaved and the vulnerable. Alternatively, such women were utterly deluded and hysterical and simply not to be believed, (again, exactly as male prejudices, past and present contend).
Understandably, many feminist scholars are reluctant to lay such charges against female mediums, as it would appear to endorse gender prejudice and oppression, historic and contemporary. One way of avoiding this conundrum is to project other motives on to women who became channels, viewing them as proto-feminists, highlighting instances where spirits seemed to encourage unfeminine and deviant behaviour, breaking social taboos. Spiritualism for women, it is argued, was a way of legitimising marginal political ideas that many feminist scholars espouse and applaud. In the past, mediumship was harnessed to many righteous and progressive movements, as diverse as women’s emancipation, the abolition of slavery, righting working-class grievances, caring for prostitutes and animal rights.
The majority of female mediumistic pronouncements did not express extravagant, radical, politicised or unconventional views. With the great majority of Spiritualist manifestations it is hard to detect any political motives or intentions (they also appear to be largely absent from Ouija séances with groups). In some cases, it might clarify the ‘why’ but not the ‘how?’, failing to explain how numerous mediums like Rosemary Brown produced puzzling material that they always insisted came from beyond themselves.