Rosemary brown beethoven biography
- Rosemary Isabel Brown (nee Dickeson, 27 July 1916 – 16 November 2001) was an English composer, pianist and spirit medium who claimed that dead composers.
- The British housewife claimed to channel the spirits of Mozart, Beethoven, Rachmaninov and more.
- Rosemary Brown claimed she had little musical training but produced over 300 pieces of music from long-dead composers including Beethoven.
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But there is another possibility, one that doesn’t so much explore the possibilities of another dimension of existence as reveal the limitations of this one. And that is to admit one more person to Brown’s stable of composers: Rosemary Brown herself. What if she was simply a late bloomer who, due to the happenstance of her birth and station and gender, never had the proper chances for higher education or professional development? It is, perhaps, a telling projection that when Brown was visited by Clara Schumann – historically, an accomplished composer in her own right – it was only to drop off works by her husband Robert.
Wives and mothers, in Brown’s worldly experience, did not qualify for the canon. But, whether by way of an impressively maintained ruse or a self-instilled belief, she hit upon a story that could bypass all that. Rosemary Brown, a housewife with musical aspirations, would, more likely than not, have been shut out by a musical establishment that prized conservatory training and disdained outmoded 19th-century styles. Rosemary Brown, medium, saw her music perform
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Brown, Rosemary Eleanor 1916-2001
OBITUARY NOTICE—See index for CA sketch: Born July 27, 1916, in Sidmouth, Devon, England; died November 16, 2001, in London, England. Musical medium and author. Brown claimed to have been contacted by some of the world's most famous composers, who channeled their works from beyond the grave through her. Brown was not well educated in music, and only had a few years of piano instruction as a girl. She had her first "vision" when she was age seven from a man she later identified as Liszt, but as a teenager took a regular job with the post office. She married in 1952 and had two children, but was widowed nine years later. In 1964 Liszt, the first of the dead composers who would spend time with her, revisited her, so Brown claimed. Other composers who came to Brown included Bach, Beethoven, Chopin and Schubert, each of whom gave her melodies to play on the piano. Contemporary composers were split on whether they believed Brown could channel the dead. Richard Rodney Bennett, a British composer, was in her corner, having received help on his own c
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Rosemary Brown
Rosemary Brown
Rosemary Brown (née Dickeson), spiritualist and musical medium, was born on 27 July 1916 in Stockwell and died on 16 November 2001.
Despite having no appropriate musical education, Rosemary, a middle-class housewife, wrote a thousand classical works, claiming that they were dictated by famous dead composers such as Bach, Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, Chopin, Debussy, Grieg, Rachmaninoff, Schumann and Liszt.
Rosemary Brown claimed that Franz Listz dictated music to her. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons.
They were quite convincing, even down to the handwriting. Some of the top names in classical music gave their opinions: British composer Richard Rodney Bennett seemed entirely convinced, according to the New York Times, who quoted him as saying: “If she is a fake, she is a brilliant one, and must have had years of training” (Time magazine). Andre Previn (then of the LSO) said, effectively, if genuine the compositions were best left on the shelf. Peter Katin, a leading interpreter of Chopin, was so impressed he recor
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