Rosemary Brown comes from a humble background.  She struggled to bring up her two children after the death of her husband and now lives modestly in South London.  She may be an ordinary woman, but she is an extraordinary medium — for it is to her that the great minds of the past have turned to air their thoughts and compositions in the present.

To Rosemary Brown, composers like Liszt, Chopin and Beethoven and playwrights such as George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell are as real as her own family and friends.  Experts are convinced that the compositions she produces are the genuine works of long dead composers and that her relatively limited musical expertise in no way explains the inspired music she transcribes.

Rosemary Brown, who has died aged 85, was a modest, sincere and utterly genuine musical medium.  While most mediums claiming to receive music extrasensorily from deceased composers do so through improvising at the piano, Rosemary's distinctive achievement lay in being able to write it down.

Her chief communicator was Franz Liszt; and even if some of the many other pieces from composers—including Chopin, Schubert, Debussy and Rachmaninov—are lightweight, the 1969 item called Grübelei (meditation), partly dictated under the watchful gaze of BBC reporter Peter Dorling and a television studio crew, is undoubtedly a most spectacular and unusual piece.  It has strong harmonies, cross-rhythms and occasional instructions in French — a point conferring authenticity, but difficult to fake.  The composer and Liszt specialist Humphrey Searle said: "We must be grateful to Mrs. Brown for making it available to us."

Many distinguished pianists played Brown's inspired compositions, among them Peter Katin, Philip Gammon, Howard Shelley, Cristina Ortiz and John Lill.  After meeting her in 1967 at Attingham Park adult education college, at the invitation of its warden Sir George Trevelyan, I wrote The Music Of Rosemary Brown (1978), and orchestrated music given to her by Beethoven, which was performed on Dutch television in 1976.

Rosemary also produced three volumes of autobiography and philosophical observations: Unfinished Symphonies (1971), Immortals At My Elbow (1974) [American title Immortals By My Side] and Look Beyond Today (1986) [the latter written with Sandra White].  Basil Ramsey published many of her pieces in the 1970s, and Lissett Publications, of Canada, produced some volumes, Music From Other Spheres, from 1990 onwards.

Born in Stockwell, south-west London, Rosemary Dickeson was the daughter of an electrician and a catering manageress.  Though her great love was dancing, when she left Rosa Bassett school, Streatham, at the age of 15, her father saw to it that she went to work for the Post Office.

During a wartime blackout in May 1940, she claimed that she heeded a voice advising her to avoid Balham high road on her way home from work, and so escaped a bombing raid that killed hundreds.  Three years later, she contracted polio, but overcame it, and, in 1948, started taking piano lessons. In my view, the limitations of her training left her unfettered by too much formal apparatus, and so better placed to receive music from others.

Rosemary's father had died in 1944; in 1952, she married Charles Brown, a government scientist; but 1961 saw both his death and that of her mother.  Rosemary was drawn to both spiritualist and New Age circles (where she met Trevelyan), and returned to the piano in 1964 after a work accident.

In the course of playing, she became aware of her hands being "taken over," so that she could produce new music by Liszt.  As she told me, it could be a laborious process getting it onto paper, but she gradually became more adept at "taking dictation" from dead composers.  The first professional assessment of her growing body of posthumous pieces came from the Edinburgh music teacher Mary Firth.  She was sufficiently convinced of its substance for her husband George to join Trevelyan in establishing a trust so that, from 1968, Rosemary could pursue her musical quest rather than her then day job as a school dinner-lady.

A year later came the BBC television interview that brought her a vastly greater audience.  Public appearances took her around Europe, and to New York and the Johnny Carson show; one of the more glamorous settings for her playing was on the Oscar Peterson television show.

Rosemary was quite unconcerned with the scepticism that inevitably followed from all this publicity: the main issue for her was survival, rather than the production of great music.  Who, in any case, dare judge the quality if it is new?  The aptly titled Revenant, received from Stravinsky in April 1972, a year after the composer had died, is a particularly intriguing example.

For many years, my family and I enjoyed the company of Rosemary and her son Thomas and daughter Georgina, who survive her.  On one occasion, my first wife, Elizabeth, while sketching Rosemary, was thinking of Delacroix and his portrait of Chopin.  Aware of Elizabeth's thoughts, Rosemary gave voice to her side of the mental dialogue: "Oh, I'm so sorry.  I nearly said that in Chopin's accent.  He's standing by me." 

It was that afternoon that Liszt appeared very vividly, standing beside me.  And instead of finding a piece of music and playing it myself, I found that Liszt was guiding my hands.  Music was being played by me without any conscious effort on my part; music I had never heard before.  After that afternoon, he kept coming back and giving me more and more music.  He seemed to be able to take over my hands as easily as putting on a pair of gloves.

After several of these dreamlike afternoons, Liszt said that I must write down the music.  With my limited musical knowledge, the work was painfully slow.  But we built up a good working relationship.

When he was 25 years old, Julian feared he would never play again because of awful pain in his finger.  He had consulted specialists who could find nothing wrong, and various treatments failed.  In desperation he came to my home in South London, and I massaged his finger.  Julian says "A feeling of great heat began to grow inside, and since that remarkable evening the pain has never returned."

Viktor then appeared in spirit and told Kerry that he had done very well.  But he added, with Liszt translating, that he wanted the flute and muted trumpet parts reversed.  Also, he said that Kerry had put the funeral bell on the wrong note.  Kerry had in fact written it for the note B flat and Viktor asked him to alter it to half a tone lower.  This simple alteration, Kerry said, completely transformed the sound and effect, making it much more mournful and dramatic.  I had not known what he had written for the bell, and of course I had not heard the opera.  By now, Kerry was utterly convinced that I was communicating with the mind of Viktor Ullmann.

It happened when three German journalists and one Hungarian photographer working for the magazine Der Speigel came to see me in the early part of 1970.  They were at my home for about an hour and a half, asking questions and taking photographs.

Eventually the inevitable question came up: "Can you see anyone now?"

Well I could.  And I told them I could see my own mother and Liszt.  There was a slight silence while they looked uneasily around the room as I have found people sometimes do, and then one of them—the Hungarian whose name is Tom Blau—said: "May I please ask Liszt a question?"

I don't normally like to bother the composers with endless questions but this man had asked so nicely that I said: "Go ahead. I don’t know whether I’ll get an answer, but do ask."

So, he asked something in very rapid Hungarian.  I looked at Liszt who said: "Would you please ask the gentleman to repeat his question more slowly.  I fear that my Hungarian is not very good."  For although Liszt is half-Hungarian, German is his natural language, with French a runner-up.

I explained all this to Mr. Blau who suggested that he might ask the question in German.  Now I know Liszt's German is sound, so I said that I thought that would be a good idea.

Then he asked the question in German — which I couldn't follow either as I don't know German except for about half-dozen simple words like yes, no, please, etc.  I looked at Liszt, who nodded and said: "Ja."

"He says 'Ja,'" I said to the Hungarian, wondering what Liszt was saying 'Ja' to.

Then Liszt said: "I am going to fetch someone."  And he disappeared.  He was back in seconds with a woman who was also in spirit.  I was able to see this lady very clearly indeed and I described her appearance, her features, face, hair, colouring and clothes.  She had, I remember, remarkably dainty feet and she wore a shawl which she kept folding across herself and holding with her hands on her opposite shoulders.

Liszt said: "Tell the gentleman about the shawl," and all the while Mr. Blau was nodding as I spoke, and he said: "Yes, she used to hold her shawl like that."

When I mentioned the small, dainty feet, he said: "That's very good.  It is my mother you are describing."  And he went on to  explain how he had always felt sorry that he had not been with her when she died.  "Now I feel better about it," he said.  "I cannot thank you enough."

It seemed that he had asked if Liszt could bring his mother, and, as usual, Liszt had been very helpful.  That seemed to clinch things with the journalists as I had never seen Mr. Blau before, of course.  It was just like Liszt to do something impressive at the vital moment, and this is why I trust him and value his friendship so greatly.

"There is indeed," he said, "but not a God as those on earth think of Him.  God is spirit.  A life-force which permeates everything and is everywhere.  Yet it is spirit which is aware, so that if people do pray together, the prayers register."

Prayer, it seems, works in a similar way to the 'teleportation' which spirits use for earthly contact.  If we think of what is good, we should be able to get on to that wavelength.

He explained that this Spirit is personal and yet impersonal at the same time, and is therefore something beyond our imagination to grasp because it does care for every life and does work towards good.

For example, he explained how in everyday matters our bodies, when ill or injured, will always try to right themselves — to heal themselves.  This is done by the Life Force which is working all the time to adjust, balance and compensate.

Liszt explained the purpose of collaborating with Brown.

"Life on your earth is rather like a nursery school.  When people die and it appears that they lived wasted lives, they still have the chance to go on and to catch up.

"Our purpose, working with you, is an attempt to make people realise this, and therefore give hope.  Your lives on earth could become happier if people knew that it is only a preliminary to the wonderful life after death."

Hell, Liszt says, is a self-made thing.

"If people have lived lives that have been deliberately destructive, or by wilful neglect or action caused suffering to others, when they arrive here on our plane, then they have to face what they have done.

"Their conscience can no longer be stifled because there is nothing between them and their conscience as there is on earth."

"In communicating through music and conversation, an organized group of musicians who have departed from your world, are attempting to establish a precept for humanity, i.e. that physical death is a transition from one state of consciousness to another wherein one retains one's individuality.  The realisation of this fact should assist man to a greater insight into his own nature and potential super-terrestrial activities."