PSYCHIC COMPOSITIONS DISCUSSED : GETTING IN TUNE WITH THE ‘OTHER WORLD’

A casual observer strolling into Stewart Robb’s lecture/recital at the Yamaha Music Education Center in Irvine Friday might have found nothing particularly unusual going on.

Nervously sifting through a pile of music on the piano, the gray-haired musician-scholar pulled out score after score, announcing matter-of-factly, “Here are some ‘Vignettes’ of Schumann,” or “This is an Impromptu in F minor by Chopin,” or “A prelude by Bach.”

Nothing unusual? Nothing could be further from the truth.

The works Robb played entered the world within the last 20 years. Last time we looked, Schumann, Chopin and Bach had been dead for some time now.

Robb, a specialist in psychic research, was playing some of the compositions set down by a modest Englishwoman named Rosemary Brown, who caused quite a fuss in the world of music about 15 years ago when she surfaced with a collection of pieces she claimed were dictated to her by famous composers from The Other World.

A stunt, obviously. A trick, perhaps. An outright fraud, maybe. Clearly, this just couldn’t be, reasoned the experts. For here was a simple housewife and mother of two, all but untrained in the art of playing music and totally ignorant of the highly disciplined technique of composing, madly dashing out hundreds of works (her total is near 1,000 now), very convincingly written in the style of the Masters.

This, Robb insisted, was no fake. He noted, with no small degree of pride, “The ones who were most impressed with Rosemary were the musicologists, the experts. The British composer Humphrey Searle lauded her Liszt compositions. Richard Rodney Bennet, another composer, was convinced the music was genuine.”

Brown, now 68, had her first clairvoyant experience as a young girl, Robb said. Franz Liszt appeared to her--at the time she had no idea who he was--explaining that later in life he would return to teach her music. “Then, in 1963, she started getting this music, first from Liszt, then from a host of others, from Monteverdi all the way to Gershwin and Fats Waller, all of whom Liszt had rounded up. He was, after all, a very popular fellow.”

But why? Why Rosemary Brown? Why did they wait this long? A thousand whys pop up.

Fielding post-performance questions, Robb calmly explained that Brown was told by Liszt that she had been selected “even before she was born, to prove to the world that there was life after death.” She was chosen, rather than an experienced composer, because Liszt and company figured she would willingly take down every note dictated. A trained musician might pull the music in a different direction. That just wouldn’t do, now would it?

No one in the modest crowd was laughing, mainly because Robb was so convincing in his presentation and because--there was no denying this--the music, as roughly played as it was, did sound like the work of those famous music makers of the past.

A mildly virtuosic piece by Debussy flowed effortlessly with a shimmering splash of tone color reminiscent of several of his water-inspired works. A bagatelle by Beethoven brooded and thundered in typical fashion. The harmonies in a “Moment Musical” by Schubert were undeniably Schubertian.

As Robb reminded his audience, Brown was carefully scrutinized by the experts. How did she do it? they wondered. She told them how each composer came, uninvited, appearing in a clear vision, and patiently began to dictate to her while she was fully awake and alert. In a recording made for Philips in 1970, Brown described Chopin’s demeanor: “He’s a very quick worker; he works far more quickly than any of the other composers.” Schubert, she said, was “very delightful, lovable, modest still and quite a gay sort of person.”

To satisfy the skeptics, Robb said, she was invited by the BBC to compose--or transcribe, or whatever--live on television. There in the studio, at a desk with blank paper before her, she waited. Then, Liszt appeared and dictated a work that was immediately written down and performed by a waiting pianist (Brown can barely play the instrument). “It was written in 5/4 in one hand and 3/4 in the other,” Robb boasted. “Now, you try counting five against three sometime.”

Perhaps an even more amazing anecdote involved an opera by a little-known composer named Viktor Ullmann, who died at Auschwitz. Robb recounted how Carey Woodward, a conductor interested in Ullmann’s music, came to Brown with a manuscript for an opera, “The Emperor of Atlantis,” written by the composer at the concentration camp.

Woodward told her nothing as he handed the pages to her. “Suddenly she pulled back in horror,” Robb said. “ ‘These have a terrible stench,’ she told Woodward. It was the stench of Auschwitz. But then, Ullmann himself appeared to her and began to make revisions in the music. Rosemary wasn’t even looking at the manuscript--she wouldn’t touch it. Ullmann positioned himself where he could examine the score.

“Woodward had come with tape recorder and notebook,” Robb continued, “and furiously made the revisions and additions as instructed. He got it all down. When I talked to him about this, he told me: ‘No alternative explanation is possible.’ He was totally convinced.”

So, it seemed, were many in the audience. Perhaps we should recall the words of Hamlet, as he soothed his shaken friend following a sighting of Hamlet Sr.’s ghost: “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy, Horatio.”