Rosemary Isabel Dickeson was born in London in 1916. She claimed to have been only seven years old when she was first introduced to the world of dead musicians. She reported that a spirit with long white hair and a flowing black cassock appeared and told her he was a composer and would make her a famous musician one day. She did not know who he was until, about ten years later, she saw a picture of Franz Liszt. Many other members of Brown's family were allegedly psychic, including her parents and grandparents. She worked for the Post Office from the age of 15. In 1948 she acquired a second-hand upright piano, and took some lessons for three years. In 1952 she married Charles Brown, a government scientist. They had a son and a daughter before her husband died in 1961. Then in 1964 Liszt supposedly renewed contact and Brown began transcribing original compositions she said were dictated to her by great musicians of the past. Brown transcribed pieces from Johannes Brahms, Johann Sebastian Bach, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Franz Schubert, Edvard Grieg, Claude Debussy, Frédéric Chopin, Robert Schumann, Ludwig van Beethoven, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Liszt. These included a 40-page sonata she attributed to Schubert, a Fantaisie-Impromptu in three movements she attributed to Chopin, 12 songs she attributed to Schubert, and two sonatas and two symphonies she attributed to Beethoven. Brown claimed that each composer had his own way of dictating to her: Liszt controlled her hands for a few bars at a time, and then she wrote down the notes; Chopin told her the notes and pushed her hands on to the right keys; Schubert tried to sing his compositions; and Beethoven and Bach simply dictated the notes. She claimed the composers spoke to her in English.
Critical reception
Brown's claims about spirit communication were disputed by sceptics. After studying her compositions, musicologists and psychologists came to the conclusion they were the work of Brown's own subconscious. Leonard Zusne and Warren H. Jones in their book Anomalistic Psychology: A Study of Magical Thinking noted that "Brown wrote hundreds of pieces of music dictated by the various composers. They were passable works, entirely in the style of these composers, but appeared to be simply reworkings of existing pieces." Professor of psychology John Sloboda wrote that Brown's music offers "the most convincing case of unconscious composition on a large scale." Psychologist Robert Kastenbaum analysed Brown's music compositions and came to doubt that they were dictated to Brown by spirits of well known composers. According to Kastenbaum: Kastenbaum suggested the composers were secondary personalities of Brown herself. Brown maintained that she had never had any musical training aside from a few piano lessons, though paranormal investigator Harry Edwards says: According to the psychologist Andrew Neher: Musicologist Denis Matthews described her music as "charming pastiches" and suggested she was re-creating compositions. Similarly Alan Rich, music critic of New York magazine, having heard a privately issued record of Brown's piano pieces, concluded that they were just sub-standard re-workings of some of their purported composers' better-known compositions. Concert pianists Peter Katin, Philip Gammon, Howard Shelley, Cristina Ortiz and John Lill have all performed her music. Brown was the subject of a BBC Radio 4 drama, The Lambeth Waltz by Daniel Thurman, first broadcast in 2017.
