Symphonie fantastique Music and the Paranormal

An encyclopedic survey of musical forteana, from fairy harps to haunted ukeleles David Sutton

An Encyclopedic Dictionary

Melvyn J Willin

McFarland 2022

Pb, 243pp, £45, ISBN 9781476685984

There have been surprisingly few books devoted to the fortean aspects of music, and none that I recall attempting the sort of broad overview Melvyn Willin offers here. He certainly has the CV for the job: he holds PhDs in music and paranormal research, is the SPR’s Archivist and boasts plenty of hands-on experience, including conducting musical Ganzfeld experiments, which yielded interesting results, and has put in the hours in allegedly haunted locations (no, he didn’t hear Borley Church’s phantom organ, despite spending the night there).

Willin is not concerned here with the fortean content of so many musical compositions

– like the literary-inspired witches, vampires or ghosts of Romanticism – but in cases where “music has been manifested, perceived, composed, performed or written about outside of its normal presence or realm”. So, there’s no place for Verdi’s Macbeth, but John Ireland’s Legend, a piece that had its genesis in a genuine paranormal experience (one endorsed by Arthur Machen, no less) warrants an entry.

Even having cleared out the folkloric and cultural aspects, the field of study is still vast, including, but not limited to: musical prodigies and savants; the mystical or supernatural aspects of musical inspiration – which in the case of a composer like Schumann could shade into intrusive inner voices and musical hallucinations; music heard without the physical presence of an instrument or musician, as in any number of hauntings; physical mediumship, like the disembodied accordian playing of DD Home (Randi’s ‘skeptical’ explanation that Home had concealed a tiny harmonica beneath his mustache remains a classic of its kind. “The author has tried this without any success at all,” Willin notes); the channelling of dead composers by medums, as in the case of Rosemary Brown, who produced new works dictated from the other side by Beethoven and Lizst (she’d always hoped for Tchaikovsky, but he never turned up); music as a producer of trance states, a component of shamanism, or a magical aid; music experienced during NDEs, as well as intriguing examples where those gathered around a deathbed heard music with no obvious physical source.

Many entries relate to particular places where phantom music has been heard, including any number of churches and castles with their trumpets, drums, pianos and (in Scotland) bagpipes; and there are some unexpected sounds from the lowerbrow end of the musical spectrum, such as the ghost of al Capone practising the ukulele in Alcatraz, or the similar instrument signed by George Formby that reportedly started playing itself in a shop in Bridgend.

Music and the Paranormal is an invaluable addition to both fortean and musicological bookshelves; as an ‘encyclopedic’ work, it’s not the kind of thing one is likely to devour in a sitting, but it brings together much material that would otherwise remain hidden away in works with wider remits, whether musical or parapsychological, in the pages of numerous journals, or buried in the SPR’s own voluminous files. Highly recommended.

★★★★