{"id":94140,"date":"2024-10-28T11:06:57","date_gmt":"2024-10-28T15:06:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/newsroom.carleton.ca\/?post_type=cu_story&p=94140"},"modified":"2025-08-19T09:37:00","modified_gmt":"2025-08-19T13:37:00","slug":"composer-music-channels-spirits","status":"publish","type":"cu_story","link":"https:\/\/carleton.ca\/news\/story\/composer-music-channels-spirits\/","title":{"rendered":"Meet the Composer Who Claimed Her Music Channelled the Spirits of Classical Music Icons"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n Meet the Composer Who Claimed Her Music Channelled the Spirits of Classical Music Icons\n <\/h1>\n \n <\/header>\n <\/div>\n\n \n <\/path>\n <\/path>\n <\/svg>\n <\/div>\n\n \n\n <\/div>\n<\/section>\n\n

This article is republished<\/a> from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. All photos provided by The Conversation<\/a> from various sources.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

James Deaville<\/a> is a professor in music at Carleton University.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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One of the most controversial figures in music of the 20th century is Rosemary Brown<\/a>, who died in 2001 at age 85. She was a British composer who claimed she had contact with the spirits of a number of high-profile composers of western classical music.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Brown produced approximately 300 musical pieces in a variety of styles, according to a list of manuscripts in the British Library<\/a>. She claimed they were the creations of the spirits of classic music composers that included Johann Sebastian Bach, Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Johannes Brahms, Robert Schumann, Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Chopin and Franz Liszt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Brown said her compositions were created by spirits of composers, including Bach, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms.<\/span>
\n(Louis-Maxime-Dubois\/Wikipedia)<\/span>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Brown presented herself as a simple homemaker<\/a> from a humble family who raised two children on her own after her husband’s death. Though her books mention piano classes, she could not have acquired the necessary knowledge to reproduce the style of a Beethoven or a Chopin on the basis of her self-described musical training.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Could Brown have composed such sophisticated music, was she channelling the spirits of classical music’s biggest icons \u2014 or was it an elaborate hoax?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music analysis can certainly not prove life after death, nor can one prove authorship beyond a doubt solely on analysis. However, analysis can help us assess the musical knowledge that would be necessary to compose a given piece in a specific style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Composed on TV camera<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Brown started to create the music in the 1960s and became a classical music celebrity through the 80s. She wrote three books \u2014 Unfinished Symphonies<\/em><\/a>, Immortals at my Elbow<\/em><\/a> and Look Beyond Today<\/em><\/a>. Many of her pieces were published in musical scores<\/a> and recorded<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 1969, the BBC aired a piece about Brown and her music<\/a>, and in front of the cameras she wrote the piano piece Gr\u00fcbelei<\/em><\/a> (\u201cbrooding\u201d in English), which she attributed to the spirit of Liszt.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The BBC asked for the opinion of leading British Liszt scholar Humphrey Searle<\/a> about the music, and he was enthusiastic. According to him, the piece was not in any common style of Liszt: It has connections to Liszt’s meditative and austere late works.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Music and spirits: believers, skeptics<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Spirtualists and enthusiasts of Brown’s music believed in the authenticity of Brown’s understanding of her experience with spirits and of the compositions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Needless to say, her spiritualist followers tended to downplay Brown’s musical training but praise her musical results in keeping with their belief in her claims<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For some, the evidence was not only in the music she produced. Conductor Kerry Woodward<\/a> noted Brown was able to suggest corrections to an unpublished opera<\/a> \u2014 Der Kaiser von Atlantis<\/em> by composer Viktor Ullmann<\/a>, who was a victim of the Holocaust, murdered at Auschwitz<\/a> \u2014 without having seen Ullmann’s actual score.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A very specific musical change proposed by Brown convinced Woodward that she received the changes from the dead composer himself. In her book Look Beyond Today<\/em>, Brown reports how she saw the spirit of Ullmann and relayed his notation to Woodward.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A skeptic could wonder if Brown might have somehow managed to look at the score to make informed musical guesses. In general, skeptics minimized Brown’s musical achievements, claiming that her music was an inferior imitation. They also suggested her musical training might have been more substantial than she admitted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n