Musical post-mortem

A few years ago, I wrote a piece in Skeptophilia about people who claim they're channeling the spirits of dead musicians, writers, and artists, so that we can get a chance to enjoy additional works by our favorite dead creative types.

So according to these folks, Beethoven is still composing, not just decomposing.

One of the folks I looked at in this post was Rosemary Brown (1916-2001), a British housewife who (despite little in the way of musical training) said she was writing -- if you believe her, a better word would be transcribing -- new works by Bach, Liszt, Chopin, and Debussy.  Some people have been extremely impressed, even baffled, by her ability; pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

Not everyone, however, is as taken with her compositions.  André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, said, "If the newfound compositions are genuine, they would best have been left on the shelf."

Rosemary Brown in action

So this has been one of those enduring mysteries that the believers say is absolutely convincing and the scoffers say is a ridiculous false claim.  But until now, no one has tried to do any kind of rigorous analysis of her work (or, if you believe Brown's story, the very-posthumous works of Bach et al.).

Enter Carleton University Ph.D. student Érico Bomfim.  Bomfim has undertaken a detailed analysis of Brown's compositions, with the aim of finding out if there's enough commonality with known works by famous composers to be at all confident that there's something otherworldly happening here.

"She claimed to be in touch with the spirits of those composers," Bomfim said, in an interview with  CBC Radio's All In A Day.  "She claimed to be able to talk to them, and she said that they were dictating pieces to her...  It's certainly a possibility [that it's a hoax], and that's certainly what the skeptics think about it, but the thing is, she [wrote] one piece [in front] of the cameras when BBC was recording, and it's quite a complex piece."

Bomfim believes that Brown's lack of musical training supports the possibility that her claim was true.

"[S]he didn't seem to have a very deep musical knowledge," he explained. "She just had some piano lessons, she was not a trained composer.  So it's quite hard to believe that she would be able to write that kind of piece, especially if we keep in mind that it's close to Liszt's late style."

And she wasn't just able to mimic Liszt's style.  Bomfim said that her talent for writing in the styles of famous composers was uncanny.

"To reproduce so many styles [of classical music], that never happened... There's not any other case besides Rosemary Brown.  There are many musicians that are able to imitate styles, but mostly ... it's a humorous practice, playing Happy Birthday To You in Beethoven's style.  But those are trained musicians, and they didn't show themselves to be able to write lots of new musical pieces in lots of different styles...  Rosemary Brown's case is absolutely unique, and that's why I believe it really deserves close attention from musicology."

I definitely approve of Bomfim's general approach.  No claim should be rejected out of hand, although some of them can be rejected pretty quickly (as Christopher Hitchens put it, "What is asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.").  Word-analysis software has become pretty good at figuring out who wrote passages of text using information such as word choice, word length distribution, and sentence structure; I know (much) less about any sort of musicological approach to the analogous question with compositions, but I would imagine the same sort of thing could be done there.

My intuition is that Rosemary Brown was a talented fake, or possibly simply delusional.  But intuition isn't evidence, and it'll be interesting to see what Bomfim comes up with.  And if it turns out that deceased composers are still writing music, no one will be happier than me.  For one thing, I hate that I've pretty much run out of new things to listen to by Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and Vaughan Williams.  For another, it would mean that my writing career won't be over when I kick the bucket.  It might be harder to find a publisher after I'm dead, but at least I might be able to find a competent medium to talk into being my locum.

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In writing Apocalyptic Planet, science writer Craig Childs visited some of the Earth's most inhospitable places.  The Greenland Ice Cap.  A new lava flow in Hawaii.  Uncharted class-5 rapids in the Salween River of Tibet.  The westernmost tip of Alaska.  The lifeless "dune seas" of northern Mexico.  The salt pans in the Atacama Desert of Chile, where it hasn't rained in recorded history.

In each place, he not only uses lush, lyrical prose to describe his surroundings, but uses his experiences to reflect upon the history of the Earth.  How conditions like these -- glaciations, extreme drought, massive volcanic eruptions, meteorite collisions, catastrophic floods -- have triggered mass extinctions, reworking not only the physical face of the planet but the living things that dwell on it.  It's a disturbing read at times, not least because Childs's gift for vivid writing makes you feel like you're there, suffering what he suffered to research the book, but because we are almost certainly looking at the future.  His main tenet is that such cataclysms have happened many times before, and will happen again.

It's only a matter of time.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

The voices of the dead

This week I ran into a couple of claims of a type I'd never heard of before -- and considering how long I've been in the game of analyzing the world of woo-woo, that came as kind of a surprise, especially when I found out that this sort of thing has apparently been going on for a while.

Turns out that there are people out there who say not only that they can contact the spirits of the dead,  but that they are acting as the ghost's locum.  In other words, they are guided by the not-quite-departed spirit to perform acts that the spirit itself would have done, if only it still had a body with which to do so.

Which becomes even more extraordinary when you find out that the ghosts are those of people like Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Victor Hugo.

If you're thinking, "Wait... so that means...  No, they can't really be saying that" -- yes, that's exactly what they're saying.  These "mediums" write novels, create art, write music, and then claim that the works came from the minds of the Great Masters, who were just hanging around looking for someone through which to channel talents frustrated by the inconvenience of being dead.

First we have Rosemary Brown, a British housewife who in the 1970s catapulted to fame by going public with the story that she had written music -- or more accurately, written down music -- that had been dictated to her by Debussy, Beethoven, Liszt, Chopin, and Bach.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Some people have been impressed with her work to the extent that it was actually performed and recorded in a collection called A Musical Séance.  Pianist Elene Gusch, who wrote a biography of Brown, said, "It would have been difficult for even a very able and well-trained composer to come up with them all, especially to produce them at the speed with which they came through."

André Previn, conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, was less effusive. "If the newfound compositions are genuine," he said, "they would best have been left on the shelf."

Brown died in 2001, still claiming that the pieces she wrote were actually compositions of long-dead composers.  She even described them; Debussy was a "hippie type" who "wore very bizarre clothes," Beethoven no longer had "that crabby look" because he'd regained his hearing, and Schubert tried to sing compositions to her but "he doesn't have a very good voice."

Skeptics, of course, point out that none of Brown's music goes much beyond the simpler and less technical compositions the composers created when they were alive, which is odd, especially since some of them had had hundreds of years to come up with new pieces.  But she's still considered by true believers to be one of the best pieces of spirit survival out there.

Then we've got Brazilian artist Valdelice Da Silva Dias Salum, who makes a similar claim, but about painting -- that when her hand holds the brush, she's being guided by Toulouse-Lautrec, Cezanne, Renoir, Degas, Matisse, Monet, and Van Gogh.  She actually signs her paintings not with her own name, but with the name of the artist who (she says) was doing the actual work.

"I grew up poor and illiterate," Salum told Lourdes Garcia-Navarro, the reporter for NPR who wrote the story.  "I didn't even know who these painters were.  I had no artistic talent.  But the spirits selected me."

Garcia-Navarro included in her story a drawing of a girl that Salum signed "Renoir."  To my admittedly untrained eye, it looks a bit like the attempts high school art students make to copy the style of the grand masters; there's nothing about it that has that luminous beauty that distinguishes a genuine Renoir.

But what do I know?  Apparently when Garcia-Navarro was researching for her story, she also found a writer named Divaldo Franco who is apparently producing new works by Victor Hugo, and another named Sandra Guedes Marques Carneiro, who has sold over 250,000 copies of romances she says are dictated to her from the spirit world by love-starved dead people.

No wonder they need to get their frustrations out.  When Rosemary Brown was on Johnny Carson, she apparently revealed that according to her sources, there was no sex in heaven, which is pretty damned disappointing.

Not that I'd probably be heading there even in the best-case scenario.

My general feeling about all of this is that as evidence for life after death goes, it's pretty thin.  Once again, we have the spirits of the dead communicating to the living things that don't really reveal to us much we didn't already know.  I find Rosemary Brown the most interesting of the lot -- I have to admit that some of her compositions aren't bad.  But there's nothing about them that jumps out at me and says, "Oh, this is definitely J. S. Bach at work."

The upshot is, as a writer, I'm going to continue to work on getting everything I can written while I'm alive.  It'd be nice if after I'm dead I could continue to dream up stories and upload them to the literal Cloud.  But I'm not counting on that opportunity.

So if you'd like to read something I've written (other than Skeptophilia, obviously), there's a selection at the right to choose from, and my next novel, Lock & Key, is scheduled to be on bookshelves in November.  Because once I've gone to my eternal reward (or just deserts, as the case may be), my general impression is that will be that.