“She Must Be a Pure Vessel”: An Examination of a Spirit Medium Persona

Abstract

Rosemary Brown (1916Brown ( -2001 is certainly a highly unusual case in music history. In the 1960s, she started to notate hundreds of musical pieces that she attributed to the spirits of several great concert music composers with whom she claimed to be in touch as a spirit medium. Brown also furnishes a promising persona case study. In order to convince the public that her music had a spiritual origin, she described herself (and was described) as a simple housewife and mother with no profound musical knowledge, therefore hardly capable of writing original musical pieces in the styles of acclaimed composers. The purpose of this paper is first, to provide an examination of Rosemary Brown's public persona; second, to relate it to the spiritualist tradition, in order to demonstrate that the constituent elements of Rosemary Brown's persona were available in the spiritualist cultural repertoire; and third, to relate this same persona to the implications of gender in the understanding of mediumship among spiritualists.

A ‘New Scale’ from the Beyond:Verbunkosand Triadic Transformations in a Piece Attributed to the Spirit of Liszt by Rosemary Brown

“…This understanding of 'New Scale Modulations' is corroborated by earlier research. An early effort to investigate Brown's music in greater depth can be found in Bomfim's investigation of the Sonata in F minor (1982), attributed by Brown to the spirit of Schubert (Bomfim 2015). The sonata could hardly have been composed by Schubert; it presents all the aforementioned deficiencies common to most pieces written by Brown (e.g.…”

“…it is surprising that the fields of musicology and music analysis have neglected her production for more than half a century, with the exception of our research (Bomfim 2015(Bomfim , 2019(Bomfim and 2022and Bomfim and Almada 2022).…”

“…There is no other occurrence of a composer who has reproduced, at least with some success, so many styles that are so different from one another through hundreds of original compositions, while at the same time claiming to have no relevant compositional background – not to mention the spiritual allegations. Given the virtues recognised in Brown's music (despite its unquestionable limitations and deficiencies) and its unique, intriguing and enigmatic character, it is surprising that the fields of musicology and music analysis have neglected her production for more than half a century, with the exception of our research (Bomfim 2015, 2019 and 2022; and Bomfim and Almada 2022).…”

“…44Bomfim (2019) presents a thorough discussion of Brown's persona and its close relation with depictions of historical spirit mediums. It also discusses in detail the complex, ambiguous and historical relation between mediumship and gender.…”