“'Who wrote what and when?' were the foundational questions that gave birth to musicology in the 1800s," says Frederick Reece, assistant professor of Music History at the School of Music. "But I think they’re newly relevant in an age where AI is on everyone’s lips, and every image or text needs to be called into question as a potential fake." Reece articulated these thoughts and more in a recent conversation with faculty colleague Stephen Rumph, in which the musicologists discussed over coffee Reece's new book, Forgery in Musical Composition: Aesthetics, History, and the Canon (Oxford University Press).
SR: How did you first come up with the idea of writing about forgery in music?
FR: Growing up, I took viola lessons. And I had this strange experience of a teacher putting a score on my stand that claimed to be a Handel Viola Concerto in B minor, published in 1924. I sight read a bit of the concerto in my lesson. And I can remember thinking that it sounded, frankly, not very much at all like Handel. (It had these odd asymmetrical phrase structures where, for instance, the first cadence was in measure 7. In some ways, it was closer in style to contemporary compositions from the era in which the score was published—say, 1920s Hindemith or Stravinsky—than authentic music from the 1700s.) In any case, when I finished playing, my teacher said: “I don't think it’s actually by Handel, but it's a good piece.”
Even back then, I found this puzzling. I couldn’t get it out of my head on the way home. What do you mean it’s not by Handel, when his name’s on the cover? How do we know whether this piece—or any composition, for that matter—is really by a given composer or not? And on what basis can you say “it’s a good piece,” and ask me to play it, if the whole thing is a lie?
Years later, in graduate school, I stumbled on academic sources that confirmed the concerto was a newly created work from the 1920s, intentionally misattributed to Handel by its real composer, Henri Casadesus. Increasingly, I had realized that there were many compositions like this fake Handel concerto in the classical music repertory itself. I began to read some of the scholarly texts that were out there on forgery in art history and literary studies and philosophy. Yet there was no book to read on forgery in music. So I thought: “perhaps I’ll write that book.” Years later, here I am.
SR: Let's start with the definition of compositional forgery, as opposed to, say, plagiarism. What makes a forgery a forgery?
FR: It’s good to start by distinguishing forgery from plagiarism because, in music, plagiarism is simply much more familiar to most people than forgery. This probably has a lot to do with high-profile media coverage of copyright litigation in the music industry, which generally hinges on accusations of plagiarism among artists. In cases like that, plagiarism means taking someone else's work—their songwriting or composition, for example—and claiming it as your own.
But forgery is the opposite of that. As a forger, you’re creating a new work of art—a painting, a poem, a sonata, or a symphony—and falsely attributing it to someone else: Vermeer, Shakespeare, Handel, Mozart, Schubert, whoever. Usually, the target is both dead and famous.
Importantly, what forgers steal is not someone else’s authorial work (as in plagiarism), but rather their identity as an author. This raises some knotty questions of motivation, perhaps especially in musical composition.
SR: Indeed. So, why do people forge musical works? What do they get out of it?
FR: Naturally, when we ask questions about motivation—i.e., questions about why human beings behave as they do—there is no single, universally applicable answer. But there are some patterns.
Money is one motivation. People sometimes doubt that you can turn a profit by forging music. And there’s an extent to which that doubt makes sense. It’s certainly true that musical compositions aren’t unique physical objects that can be sold for millions of dollars on their own, as one might expect of a forged painting or sculpture. But as a composer, you can publish a newly created score as your arrangement or transcription of a (made up) historical source by a famous historical master, securing or selling a copyright for your phony arrangement, and earning money that way. This has been a fairly common strategy, and for good reason: a work marketed as a new adaptation of an antique source by a well-known figure in classical music’s past often sells better than a genuinely and transparently new work in an old style.
We can also understand some compositional forgeries as a type of classical music fan fiction. By this I mean that forgeries fulfil certain unfulfilled desires we have as musicians working with historical repertory. For example: there are a fair few viola forgeries—like Casadesus’s “Handel” concerto—because, all joking aside (and I say this with love), the viola needs fan fiction. When you play certain instruments, authentic repertory by canonical composers from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries can be difficult to find. So, for a certain kind of musician, it is tempting to fabricate that repertory for the purposes of performance and study. One might even be inclined to attach a historical composer’s name to the works one makes up from scratch, perhaps at first as a sort of musical make believe. Unfortunately, this kind of thing can easily get out of hand.
Finally, there are forgers who are motivated above all by a sense of spite. Most often, the spite in question is directed at a real or imagined musical establishment. If we’re being honest, a great many people who orbit the classical music world feel they have been unjustly overlooked, undervalued, or otherwise betrayed by institutional gatekeepers: critics, academics, publishers, etc. It is easy to become resentful under these conditions. And to a certain kind of personality, forgery presents itself as a spiritually satisfying form of revenge. You get to humiliate the experts who you believe have unjustly spurned you, seemingly demonstrating that the emperor has no clothes. And, in the same stroke, you get to experience the exquisite pleasure of having your own compositions mistaken for works of genius by figures whose talents are widely believed to be beyond the capacity of anyone living today: Handel or Haydn or Mozart or Schubert. For some forgers, this sort of scenario is extremely psychologically appealing.
SR: Your book is divided into two halves: “Part I. Romantic Cultures of Forgery, 1791–1945,” and “Part II. Modern Cultures of Forgery, 1945–2000.” Is there a reason why you structured it that way?
FR: There are certain patterns which distinguish the cases in the first half of the book—which begins in 1791, with Mozart’s death—from the more recent cases in the second half of the book, beginning in 1945.
My book argues that the Urtext culture that emerged around the end of the Second World War had significant effects on modern forgers and forgeries in the latter half of the twentieth century. This was an era in which music scholarship and criticism were becoming increasingly professionalized. The standards of evidence for what got to count as an authentic work by an established composer were far stricter than they had previously been.
In the attempt to deceive musicians under this new regime of academic scrutiny, forgers changed their techniques. They began to construct newly elaborate forms of falsified documentation—e.g., phony manuscripts, watermarks, and correspondence—to accompany a fake composition. And they also began to strategically tailor their forgeries to match the descriptions of missing works for which scholars were already searching. For example: this was the case with Schubert’s missing “Gastein” Symphony, as forged in the 1970s, and Haydn’s missing “Sturm und Drang” keyboard sonatas, as forged in the 1990s.
Before 1945, by contrast, there was a kind of imaginative playfulness with which Romantic forgers conjured new-old works that nobody had expected to find. Figures like Marius Casadesus and Fritz Kreisler could publish and perform unknown “Handel” or “Vivaldi” concertos without being expected to produce any of the academic documentation that we would expect today.
SR: That brings us up to the end of the twentieth century. But what is the future of forgery in music? Maybe I should end by asking: how do we respond or prepare now?
FR: I need to be careful in answering this because, to be honest, I think it can be dangerous for historians to attempt to use the past as a means of predicting the future.
Nonetheless, I wrote the book in part because I do believe that knowing the history of fakery will make us less vulnerable to deception, now and in years to come. It’s harder to fool someone who already knows all the most effective tricks.
From this perspective, the book does contain a fair bit of practical advice. There are certain techniques and patterns to forgery—filling established gaps in a composer’s canon; distributing photocopies of historical manuscripts instead of originals that can be chemically tested; pandering to cliché ideas of how a given composer’s style should sound, etc.—which we should learn to watch out for as scholars and musicians.
Philosophically speaking, I also think forgery asks us certain urgent questions about our values that we will need to confront in the present and future:
Why care about authenticity, originality, or artistic self-expression in the first place? Any student of music history knows that there have been and continue to be cultures in which music circulates anonymously. So, as musicians, why get so invested in knowing who wrote what and when?
“Who wrote what and when?” were the foundational questions that gave birth to musicology in the 1800s. But I think they’re newly relevant in an age where AI is on everyone’s lips, and every image or text needs to be called into question as a potential fake. Many creative people, including our students in the arts, understandably feel threatened by the prospect of a world in which any existing artistic style can be convincingly replicated at the push of a button or the click of a mouse. Clearly, there’s an extent to which the threat is real. However, the history of forgery also teaches us that when our culture is flooded with imitations, we start to care about authenticity more, not less. So I think there’s reason to hope that AI will ultimately lead to a positive re-evaluation of the creative human self, just as forgery has.
Looking beyond the horizon, a final point on which forgeries invite hard reflection is classical music culture’s often lamented tendency to value dead composers over living ones. Forgery has always thrived in traditions that place a high premium on historical authenticity without cultivating viable outlets for new forms of creativity. Like every generation before us, we need—in my opinion—to strike a delicate balance between honoring past achievements and future potential. Studying the history of forgery is one way to think seriously about this problem. Now and forever, we need fakes to remind us what it means to keep it real.