The Voices of Silence

Liszt was the first. He dropped by to say hello one day in the 1930s when Rosemary Brown was only seven. "He had long white hair and wore a black gown," she recalls, "and he told me that when I grew up, he would give me music." Sure enough, one day in 1964, when Rosemary was playing the piano in her home in Laitwood Road, Balham, one of London's poorer suburbs, she suddenly lost control of her hands. She looked up and there was Liszt, hawk nose, white hair, black gown and all, guiding her fingers over the keys.

Liszt soon rounded up a staggering assortment of creative but deathless friends, among them Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and J.S. Bach. They all seemed to have learned English and appeared eager to use Mrs. Brown to make up for lost composition time. Rosemary laid in a supply of music paper and set to work copying down the carefully considered musical thoughts of history's greatest composers. "Liszt controls my hands for a few bars at a time, and then I write the music down," explains Mrs. Brown. "Chopin tells me the notes at the piano and pushes my hands onto the right keys; if it is a song, Schubert tries to sing it--but he hasn't got a very good voice. Beethoven and Bach prefer to have me seated at the table with pencil and paper; then they give me the key, the timing, the left hand and the right hand."

Rosemary and her new-found friends did not begin to attract attention until 1966. Understandably, she says. "I thought people would think I was crazy." Then she was introduced to Sir

George Trevelyan, grandson of the famous historian, warden of Shropshire Adult College near Shrewsbury, and later to Music Experts George and Mary Firth. The three set up a fund to permit Rosemary to give up her job as a cook and devote herself full time to the composers. Other musicians--among them Michael Tippett and Hepzibah Menuhin--became interested. The BBC asked her to make television appearances. Recently. Philips Records recorded a collection of her old-masterly music. It will be released in the U.S. this month as A Musical Seance.

Everyone loves a mystery. Whichever side one takes on the question of communication with the dead, Rosemary is clearly a musical mystery. There is the music itself, a great deal of it, including, on the new record alone, eight works that she claims are by Liszt, three by Chopin and one each by Beethoven, Schubert, Debussy, Brahms, Grieg and Schumann. The pieces all are characteristic of their alleged composers. Some of them are good enough to have been written by a Liszt or a Beethoven in a nodding moment, though they also suggest the possibility of highly skilled parody. But Rosemary does not seem to be composing the music herself. She has lived most of her life as a harried Balham housewife. Though she had psychic experiences as a child, she had little musical training and appears to have limited musical ability. Repeated tests suggest that she cannot even take down the simplest melody by dictation. Then who is smuggling all those notes into Rosemary's piano?

Outright acceptance of the possibility that she is really in touch with Liszt and friends is, naturally, rare. But at press conferences and confrontations, Rosemary regularly disarms reporters and cynics with her modesty ("I only take what comes") and her homely use of detail. "We would call Debussy a hippie today," she adds. "He tells me he does much more painting than music." Liszt, she says, often accompanies her on shopping trips and once checked up on the price of bananas; Chopin has become a TV addict, though he disapproves of much that appears on the BBC. "When Schubert first appeared to me he was wearing his spectacles but I think it was only to make sure I recognized him. Now he doesn't wear them at all. Beethoven," she adds, shattering nearly everyone's preconception, "hasn't got that crabby look." Even celebrated musical doubters show a grudging respect for Rosemary. "If she is a fake," says British Composer Richard Rodney Bennett, "she is a brilliant one and must have had years of training. Some of the music is awful, but some is marvelous. I couldn't have faked the Beethoven."

Raising Spirits. The music itself is less interesting than the manner in which it is supposedly given. Mediums have come and gone throughout history. Today both science and the general public are more concerned with psychic phenomena than at any other time within this century. For those who long to believe in it, what could be at stake in Rosemary's rise is proof of life after death.

For those who do not believe, the whole thing is clearly a case of chicanery for profit and fame. The Philips contract has brought Rosemary $2,000 to $3,000 but can be expected to earn more. If Rosemary is in touch with Liszt, the best way to prove it is not to produce the lukewarm but pleasant Grubelei she claims to have received from him, but to discover something from the past, perhaps Liszt's now vanished manual of piano technique, which he wrote for the Geneva Conservatoire. The spirits that mediums raise always inconveniently refuse to answer the very questions that would prove their existence. So far, Rosemary's musical familiars have been no exception. When TIME posed a choice of 20 musical mysteries for solution, Rosemary replied, "I cannot push a button and call on the composers just like that."

The most outspoken faith in Mrs. Brown has been voiced by Sir Donald Tovey, one of England's most respected musicologists. Asked by Philips to write a liner note for Mrs. Brown's record, Sir Donald bluntly declared that the composers are real: "It is the implications relevant to this phenomenon that we hope will stimulate sensible and sensitive interest and stir many who are intelligent and impartial to consider and explore the unknown of man's mind and psyche." Sir Donald dictated his liner notes to Rosemary Brown on January 1, 1970; he died in 1940.

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