ROSEMARY BROWN

The starting point of this installation was Rosemary Brown, a British housewife without any formal music training who claimed she was communicating with the spirits of famous dead composers such as Beethoven, Haydn, Liszt, and others. She alleged that the composer ghosts not only talked to her but also compelled her to write down their new scores. Musicologists who studied these compositions had unsurprisingly inconclusive and varying opinions about the validity of her claims, and Brown has remained a rather marginal phenomenon after her small media sensation of the 1970s.

This installation encapsulates two musicians in a room equipped with two pianos. Over the course of the exhibition, these musicians give live performances of Rosemary Brown's transcriptions attributed to otherworldly incarnations of Beethoven and Haydn, and the performances are alternated with periods of time when their recitals are played from a recording. While the viewers are invited to observe the recitals, they are not actually able to hear the performance, or any other hypothetical presences and occurrences registered inside the room, because the room is equipped with soundproofed revolving doors. Upon leaving the installation site, viewers were provided with a take-home audio recording of the recital.