The music of psychic Rosemary Brown

[dfrankjazz]

Hi friends, I'm wondering if any of you are familiar with the story of musical psychic Rosemary Brown, who claimed to receive hundreds of compositions from deceased great composers such as Liszt, Chopin, etc..any thoughts out there? I've listened to some of the recordings of these "channeled" compositions and they are good..

Dave Frank
Director, Dave Frank School of Jazz
NYC

[thalbergmad]

I was talking to Beethoven last night and he said she was a fraud.

I have seen a few of her compositions and personally remained unconvinced. However, notable musicians such as R R Bennett seem to think otherwise.

I have an 8 hour session with Sorabji tonight, so I will let you know how I get on.

Thal

[j_menz]

Hi friends, I'm wondering if any of you are familiar with the story of musical psychic Rosemary Brown, who claimed to receive hundreds of compositions from deceased great composers such as Liszt, Chopin, etc..any thoughts out there? I've listened to some of the recordings of these "channeled" compositions and they are good..

Amazingly, composers who clearly developed during the course of their lives ceased to do so, despite the transformational nature of death and the intervening century or two.  On that basis alone, it seems improbable.

Also, the copyright issue makes my head spin.  

[dfrankjazz]

I've just started listening..some of the music sounds simplistic, but there was a lovely piece called Gruberei supposedly from Liszt that was simultaneously in 5/4 in RH and 3/2 in the LH. Did he do that whilst he was here? That one showed signs of development and was a good piece..it's a compelling story at least IMO..

DF

[ted]

One of the old, dead masters dictated this to me back in 1971 during a trance. Not sure which one, but there was a heavy smell of brandy about the piano during the manifestation.

[Bob]

Ted!  You can't post that in here.

We obviously have a need for a separate child board for compositions that were psychically given to living Piano Street members.

[dfrankjazz]

that's a nice piece Ted:)

[ted]

Thanks Dave, that is a real compliment from as good a player as you. I wrote many such pieces when younger, some in romantic idiom, many in stride, ragtime and swing, which styles have been something of an infatuation since I was a kid. Fifteen of them are on the Pianoworld CD. In recent years I have put most of my energy into improvisation.

Deep as my liking is for virtually all the American jazz related idioms, strengthened through my friendship with David Thomas Roberts and other wonderful contemporary talents, I think a degree of background contact and immersion is necessary. Having been born and raised in a musical environment remote from jazz, ragtime and so on, and lacking the desire to travel, it is hardly surprising that they are not my "native tongue", as it were.

Nonetheless, a great blessing of the internet is that we can listen to players like you, Jim Hession and many others who are kind enough to explain exactly what is happening during the processes of creation. At sixty-four I am probably wise just to go flat out for my own personal forms of music, but today's global, digital world offers the young a fabulously wide experience of background learning opportunity.

The piece above was, in fact, more or less improvised one night in 1971 after I came home from working on the waterfront. Nothing psychic or mystical I'm afraid. I had seen a television documentary about Rosemary Brown the week before and thought it a rather nice romantic association.

[dfrankjazz]

I thought that piece WAS a piece by Liszt..you go Ted! Keep swingin man!

DF

[ahinton]

I was talking to Beethoven last night and he said she was a fraud.

!!!

I fear that Beethoven was right. That said, I don't have the impression that she was seeking to defraud anyone for the sake of so doing; she just happened to believe that what she was doing was what she said she was doing and that the sources of the material were what she claimed them to be. She was no big publicity seeker and did not make, or seek to make, a fortune out of her claims or her work.

I have seen a few of her compositions and personally remained unconvinced. However, notable musicians such as R R Bennett seem to think otherwise.

I do find this strange. I recall discussing this with Humphrey Searle, the noted authority on Liszt, at a time when he, among others, had been asked to vet her alleged "Liszt" pieces; he wasn't convinced but at the same time was curious as to how she managed to do what she did at all, given her evident lack of skill. He seemed to conclude that something unusual was at work here, even though there was no way of assuming that it was as Ms Brown herself claimed. If her claims were indeed true, the prospect of such post mortem mental atrophy as exemplified in the alleged composers' pieces would indeed be quite simply too depressingly horrifying to contemplate!

That such things can - or at least could - happen is, however, not necessarily to be dismissed. One case that strikes me with particular force is that of Elgar's Third Symphony. It is, of course, true that, unlike Ms Brown, Anthony Payne was (and indeed is) a skilled composer with plenty of technique and imagination and a profound grasp of Elgar's work but, from the largely disorganised and incomplete sketches that Elgar left for his final work, even a distinguished composer and Elgar scholar would have had no end of trouble in turning them into a symphony, particularly one to which conductors and other scholars subsequently listened without being able to tell which music was Elgar's own and which Payne's necessary elaborations, interventions et al (Payne had not only to make sense of the material with which he was working but also to compose more material to make it all hang together). Payne himself - not one to make rash claims (very much the reverse, in fact) - felt as though he had somehow been "taken over" at certain points when working on the piece and that the end result is as though a kind of collaboration between him and Elgar, for all that Elgar had died a couple of years before Payne was even born. I would still be wary of stating that some kinds of psychic forces were at work here, but how else to account for what Payne did I have no idea.

I have an 8 hour session with Sorabji tonight, so I will let you know how I get on.

I'm sure that we're all agog!

Best,

Alistair