The medium is the message.
Does anyone remember Rosemary Brown? Brown was the English spiritualist who claimed that the great composers were still very much active and dictating posthumous works to her.
At the age of 7 (circa 1923), Brown claimed to have been confronted by a curious specter with long white hair and a flowing cassock. The specter prognosticated that one day he would make her famous. It was ten years before she stumbled across an old photograph and realized that what she had encountered was no less than the shade of Franz Liszt.
Brown was born into a family of alleged psychics. Both her parents and grandparents claimed extrasensory powers. Brown took up the piano at the age of 15. Her period of study is unclear, as she seems to have changed her story over the decades, but she would have us believe she was basically a dilettante with little formal training.
Then, in 1964, the ghost of Liszt reappeared and she began “transcribing” new works by the great composers – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Brahms, Grieg, Debussy, Rachmaninoff, and Stravinsky. And Liszt, of course. These included two symphonies she attributed to Beethoven, a new “Fantaisie-Impromptu” by Chopin, and a 40-page sonata by Schubert.
She claimed that some of the composers directed her hands on the keyboard (Chopin and Liszt); others sang (Schubert) or dictated notes (Bach and Beethoven). All of them communicated in English.
Skeptics abounded. A number of critics and musicologists dismissed the new compositions as substandard pastiches, claiming that the great composers tended to reinvent themselves and push boundaries, while these freshly “dictated” works offered nothing of the sort.
Some psychologists attributed the phenomena to extraordinary activity on the part of Brown’s subconscious, with the medium essentially reworking and synthesizing all the music she had been exposed to as a child.
Still, they had to admit it was impressive. Over the course of her life, Brown produced hundreds of such pieces. One expert described it as “the most convincing case of unconscious composition on a large scale.”
Respected concert pianists Howard Shelley, Peter Katin, Cristina Ortiz, and John Lill have all included these perhaps spurious works on their programs.
Brown died in 2001. Whether or not she herself is now dictating is anyone’s guess.
Rosemary Brown’s obituary in The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/news/2001/dec/11/guardianobituaries
Brown meets the Amazing Kreskin (she makes her appearance 9 minutes in; she plays at 12:30):
Documentary on Brown from 1976: