Rosemary Brown "Music from the Beyond?" documentary

[michael_sayers]

Hi Everyone,

I just noticed that the Rosemary Brown Music from the Beyond? documentary is available. I found it interesting, and maybe some of you will feel the same.

Mvh,
Michael

[ahinton]

Hi Everyone,

I just noticed that the Rosemary Brown Music from the Beyond? documentary is available. I found it interesting, and maybe some of you will feel the same.

Mvh,
Michael

Interesting insofar as it might go, but deeply flawed and potentially quite depressing...

Best,

Alistair

[michael_sayers]

Interesting insofar as it might go, but deeply flawed and potentially quite depressing...

Best,

Alistair

The cinematography is a bit dated, but I don't have an issue with that or find it to be depressive.


Mvh,
Michael

[ahinton]

The cinematography is a bit dated, but I don't have an issue with that or find it to be depressive.

Mvh,
Michael

It is indeed dated, but I wrote "depressing", not "depressive" and, by that, I mean that, if RB's work is anything by which to go and if it was sourced from the composers as claimed, i.e. by some form of inexplicable "dictation" process, the apparent state of creative decomposition though which composers evidently go after their respective deaths is what's depressing and prompts the question as to why any composer would even want to find a way of doing such a thing (were it indeed possible) if the best that might result is at best a pale semi-reflection of the kinds of thing that they did when alive - and why would several of them have chosen only Brown?

Something's at work here - and it's not uninteresting - but I do not see it as being what's it was claimed to be.

Something not entirely dissimilar happened when Anthony Payne was working on Elgar's sketches for his Third Symphony, to the extent that he began to feel as though he needed to work as if "with" Elgar and even to "become" him in some way in order to complete the piece, but the circumstances are quite different in that the composer's sketches (such as they were) were available to him as were his own skills as a professional composer aand musicologist and at a time when Elgar's work as a whole had become far more widely known than it was at the time of his death in 1934 (and Payne was born more than two years after Elgar died); all that said, this doesn't fully explain his success with this daunting project.

In both Brown's and Payne's cases considerable advances in specific areas of neuroscience will need to be developed before there can be any chance of finding out what was actually going on in them; Payne's work is now widely accepted as representative of the kind of thing that Elgar might have done had he lived a little longer, whereas Brown's remains open to much doubt, notwithstanding certain comments on it by Searle, Parrott, Lill, Katin, Rodney Bennett and others.

Best,

Alistair

[michael_sayers]

Hi Alistair,

I am interested to see the scores of R.B.'s orchestral compositions, including the referenced symphonies attributed to Beethoven, and also the orchestral Stravinsky.

To write half-way passably for piano is one thing.  I don't think one can write half-way passably for full orchestra without a lot of study of orchestral scores and some professional experience with orchestration - exceptions to this being, of course, quite considerable music geniuses.

If anything, and with supernatural claims aside, I think one can give credit to R.B. for versatility!

Here is piano piece attributed to Debussy . . .

I wonder who owns the rights to the hundreds of compositions, assuming that there really are that many?


Mvh,
Michael

[ahinton]

I wonder who owns the rights to the hundreds of compositions, assuming that there really are that many?

Mvh,
Michael

I have no idea how many there are but imagine that copyright in them must belong to RB's estate since they are her work. I could not tell you who administers this, however, so your best option would be to contact the Performing Right Society in UK, whose switchboard phone number is +44 207 580 5544 or you could submit an online enquiry to it using the form found at https://www.prsformusic.com/aboutus/contact_us/Pages/contactus.aspx.

Best,

Alistair

[dogperson]

Below are two links regarding the status of works.  The second is a sheet to the piano scores

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/the-music-of-rosemary-brown-from-a-pianists-perspective/


https://app.box.com/shared/yslqfobtz4

[ahinton]

Below are two links regarding the status of works.  The second is a sheet to the piano scores

https://elenedom.wordpress.com/2011/05/15/the-music-of-rosemary-brown-from-a-pianists-perspective/


https://app.box.com/shared/yslqfobtz4

Useful as the above is to those interested, wherever the scores themselves might be (and one must assume from the above that there may be others in addition to those mentioned that are in a collection somewhere, although that ought to be relativel easy to look up if they're in an academic library) the matter of rights ownership is another matter; I can only assume that these belong to Brown's estate unless she had bequeathed them into the public domain upon her death.

Best,

Alistair

[themeandvariation]

To me, this one is quite good. Even beautiful.. with it's rhythmical  sinuousness, and harmonic suggestiveness (in places, though not throughout)  ….  Many things to appreciate about it..and  perhaps this one makes the strongest impression of those i've heard from Rosemary Brown.  

[michael_sayers]

To me, this one is quite good. Even beautiful.. with it's rhythmical  sinuousness, and harmonic suggestiveness (in places, though not throughout)  ….  Many things to appreciate about it..and  perhaps this one makes the strongest impression of those i've heard from Rosemary Brown.  

That one seems almost performable, though as you seem to observe, it is a bit thin on interesting ideas and what is done with them vs. its duration.  Liszt's creativity could have gone a lot further in that one - surely, for him, something like that would have just been the equivalent of a first draft.


Mvh,
Michael

[michael_sayers]

I have no idea how many there are but imagine that copyright in them must belong to RB's estate since they are her work. I could not tell you who administers this, however, so your best option would be to contact the Performing Right Society in UK, whose switchboard phone number is +44 207 580 5544 or you could submit an online enquiry to it using the form found at https://www.prsformusic.com/aboutus/contact_us/Pages/contactus.aspx.

Best,

Alistair

Hi Alistair,

Thanks for the information and the link.


Mvh,
Michael