Rosemary Brown - Just Writin’ it Down
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Rosemary Brown (1916 - 2001) relates in her autobiography:
“The first time I saw Franz List [sic] I was about seven years old, and already accustomed to seeing the spirits of the so-called dead. For some reason he never said who he was that morning. I suppose he knew I would eventually see a picture of him somewhere and would recognize him . . . He then said: ‘when you grow up I will come back and give you music 1.’”
Many years later, as a mother and widow in South London, Brown went on to produce several hundred compositions, most of them short piano pieces. She claimed the music was dictated to her by the spirits of deceased composers, certainly to include Liszt. Brown’s parents and grandparents were allegedly psychic, and she considered herself to be a spirit medium.
Brown was the subject of television broadcasts in the 1960s and 1970s, through the course of which she was tested in various ways (none at all satisfactory in proving her claims to be a medium, but certainly demonstrative of her skill as a composer). Her compositions have been scrutinized by the likes of Leonard Bernstein and Richard Rodney Bennett, and experts generally were impressed with the quality of Brown’s work but did not believe it to constitute proof of her claims 2. What can be said with certainty is that each work does exhibit stylistic features that are characteristic of the work of its alleged composer. It has been written that similarities were less evident and sometimes absent in the large scale features of extended works. The composers, we are told, “spoke” to Brown in English, though most of them had not spoken English proficiently in life.
Rosemary Brown described Franz Schubert’s singing voice as poor—she probably did not realize that he was an experienced chorister with arguably the best vocal technique of the comparably famous composers.
Brown claimed to have had no formal music training, and very little informal training. She had completed “two years of piano lessons and a couple of halfhearted trips to the opera,” and a neighbor once related that she “could just about struggle through a hymn” at the piano3.
Because Brown styled herself as a psychic medium and because of their own metaphysical beliefs, many accept that Brown was effectively transcribing the works of dead masters through some sort of spiritual telepathy. Since classical music is an area of expertise for me (I have over 20 years of experience in the study of the classical orchestral, operatic, choral, and chamber literature, and am a composer and arranger), I would like to discuss Brown’s work from a musical standpoint and also point out some non-musical issues that are quite problematic for the “spirit medium” explanation.
Ultimately, the phenomenon of Brown’s music is simple to explain if one understands that it is extremely unlikely that Brown was as musically ignorant as she purported to be.
Consider this piece which Brown calls an “Étude” by Chopin. Those thoroughly familiar with Chopin’s work will recognize that this piece is eerily similar to the Prélude in E-flat minor, Op. 28 No. 14, in several ways. The tempo, the harmonic modality, the topography of the melody, and the texture are directly related, and the ending cadence of this piece is all but identical in detail to that of the Prélude—nearly as if it had been cut and pasted. Brown’s composition is less carefully controlled than its authentic counterpart, and is certainly not balanced and refined enough to have been a published work of Chopin, but it is not without some degree of craftsmanship.It would be wrong to suggest that Chopin did not compose works which were similar to one another, because he certainly did. But Brown’s piece and the E-flat minor Prélude share one very uncommon characteristic: the left and right hands play exactly the same figures in parallel throughout the entire piece. That is, the left hand is always doing exactly what the right is doing. This, to my knowledge, is not something that is true of any of Chopin’s hundreds of compositions apart from that particular Prélude. One would expect that, should such a device have been used in another composition, it would have been in a piece with a different character and not such a direct mimic of the only other composition with that peculiar relationship between the hands throughout.
Furthermore, the Préludes were composed early in Chopin’s career. It is inconceivable that Chopin, at (okay—after) the end of his life, would choose to compose a piece that bore such detailed similarity to a relatively insignificant piece from a distant time in his life. There were distinct differences in Chopin’s compositional styles early on and near the end, and it is quite uncommon in the literature for a composer to return so directly and completely to a style or a set of characteristics from the days of his youth.
Another problem is that Brown’s piece is of much less technical difficulty than any of the forty-eight Études of comparable tempo from Op. 10 and 25. It is, really, just about as challenging as the E-flat minor Prélude, come to think of it.
Here is a piece Brown said was communicated by the French impressionist composer Claude Debussy, a “Danse Exotique.” While the title is not characteristic of Debussy, the music is thoroughly reminiscent in tone and character of Debussy’s waltz “La plus que lente,” though it is not as achingly faithful a portrait of its model as Brown’s version of the Chopin Prélude. It also contains textural and harmonic echoes of a Debussy Prélude, “La Sérénade interrompué.“
By the end of his relatively short life, Debussy’s pianistic style had evolved from consisting primarily of dancelike movements inspired by Romantic period composers into a much more diverse, lush, and amorphous sort of soundscaping. Again, we have the problem of style—if Debussy did dictate this work from the grave, he mysteriously chose to return to his youthful style and to neglect the development and maturity of thought and artistry which is so integral to his later work.
Had I listened to the first of these two pieces without having an idea of what composer is supposed to have written it, still I would have been instantly reminded of the Chopin Prélude. The similarity is gripping and inescapable—one is clearly a mimic of the other. I would say that the “Debussy” piece, though, is really not any more characteristic of its purported composer in a general way than of the later works of Fauré or even those of Max Weber. But there is some minutia in Brown’s piece that specifically calls to mind traits of the two mentioned works of the Frenchman.
There is nothing I can definitively say as an expert on musical composition that would categorically prove that these composers did not write these pieces. I can only demonstrate the absurdity of such claims by pointing out that the composers were, in fact, dead at the time the manuscripts were produced. What I can do is point out that these two pieces do not fit in context with the bodies of real work of the men Brown insisted wrote them, and that they are, in some obvious respects, consciously imitative of specific extant works. I can also assert that there are certain shapes and motives which are similar between the two pieces surveyed here, though not to the extent that it is obvious that they are the work of the same person.
It is hard to get a sense of Brown’s musical ability from media reports. While her neighbor evidently did not think highly of her skills at the keyboard, some accounts describe her as being capable of playing many of the pieces she “transcribed.” What is widely emphasized is that there was no evidence Brown had ever received formal music training.
Outside the realm of music theory, there are at least two questions I would pose to those who support the veracity of Brown’s explanation for her work:
- Why did only famous composers dictate to Brown? That is, although Brown is supposed to have served as medium to quite a few composers, they are all members of the highest echelons in the pantheon of established masters. Why didn’t now-obscure composers such as John Hook, Daniel Gottlieb Turk, John Field, Johann Hummel, Ignaz Moscheles, etc., all of whom wrote piano music and were quite popular in their own times, communicate to Brown? Put another way, if Brown’s peculiar “skill” was available to dead composers, why did only the most famous ones employ her, and why are the works they communicated so lackluster in quality and short in duration? It is reasonable to assume that, if Brown consciously imitated specific composers, she would have chosen those composers best represented in print and audio media, for their works are much more accessible than those of more obscure composers, and they could have been the only ones with which she was familiar even in name.
- Why was almost all the music in the form of short piano pieces? This is not so much an issue when considering Chopin, the vast majority of whose output was piano works, but it is ridiculous to think that a Beethoven, Schubert, or Brahms—all of whom Brown supposedly channeled—wouldn’t have wanted to write string quartets or even larger works.
For me, the two most likely explanations for Rosemary Brown’s music are these:
- Brown was a musical autodidact of phenomenal quality and withheld the extent of her study from public knowledge. There is no question that Brown had talent as a composer, even though her works do not exhibit any remarkable genius. We know that she did undertake at least a small quantity of musical study. Having been empowered with the basic tools, Brown certainly could have privately developed that knowledge and skill in order to compose piano music of substance, even without having great skill at the keyboard.
- Brown was a musical savant. While most savants display what are viewed as behavioral disorders in addition to remarkable ability in a certain field, many of them are perfectly “normal” and functional in society. Consider Daniel Tammet, the British man who can easily multiply and divide large numbers almost instantaneously and who once recited the value of π to over 22,000 decimal places without a single mistake—he says that every number from 1 to 10,000 appears to him as a distinct abstract image, but he’s a plain, well-spoken, ordinary enough English guy if ever you met one, and believes a severe seizure he had as a young boy could have awakened phenomenal pattern-manipulating abilities within his brain.
It is definitely puzzling why Brown, as obviously a woman of great talent, would have chosen to decline credit for her skillful—if not genius—work. Since she was raised in an environment conducive to validation of the paranormal, perhaps she had some bizarre reason for using her talent to support such beliefs. It is also plausible that, as an untrained musician with an antiquated and outmoded style of composition, Brown felt she could gain more publicity and attention by presenting her work as the product of supernatural activity.
Either explanation would present interesting problems to the behavioral scientist, but neither requires the shouldering of such tremendous metaphysical machinery as a belief that the spirits of dead composers chose to telepathically convey relatively ersatz trifles to an English widow.
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