Forgery in Musical Composition is the act of intentionally misattributing one’s own newly created musical works to figures from the historical past. My forthcoming book of this title will examine the methods and motives of successful forgers in classical music culture while advancing a novel thesis grounded in detailed analyses of genuine fakes. The study contends that, rather than simply imitating pre-existing works, the most convincing compositional forgeries put an anachronistic twist on old-fashioned styles and techniques. Thus forgeries can be understood not as imperfect facsimiles of historical compositions but rather as documents of aesthetic prejudice which reflect modern-day ways of hearing, theorizing, and evaluating the musical past.

This presentation illustrates the book’s core analytical argument by addressing a range of scores created in the twentieth century yet passed off as works by celebrated composers from the 1600s and 1700s. Fritz Kreisler disguised La Précieuse (1910) as a work by Louis Couperin using contrary-motion parallel 5ths which today sound more evocative of the pseudo-medievalism of the Belle Époque character piece than any authentic product of the seventeenth century. Henri Casadesus’s “Handel” Viola Concerto (1924) begins with an asymmetrical 3 + 2 + 3 harmonic rhythm which develops into a 7-measure phrase distinctly reminiscent of interwar neo-classical riffs on music from the 1700s. More recently, Vladimir Vavilov grounded the popular “Caccini” Ave Maria (1970) in a descending minor tetrachord loop which might have sounded plausibly Baroque if not for the inclusion of unprepared dominant-thirteenth chords all but identical to Joseph Kosma’s mid-century jazz take on the minor tetrachord sequence in Autumn Leaves (1945).

Analyses such as these suggest that forged works have important truths to tell us about the history of musical technique precisely because they are not what they appear. On an aesthetic level, the book proposes that successful forgeries tend not to pass the test of time for the very same reason that they work so spectacularly on first hearing. And it is in this sense that the timely untimeliness of forgeries can itself emerge as a rich subject of inquiry for a music theory in transition.