Scholars of early music face a problem that is one of an important nature and one that endures and that is the question of who is actually the composer of music surviving today and in the form of various written manifestations from early period of music. The work of Bruce Haynes entitled: “The End of Early Music: A Period Performer's History Of Music For The Twenty-First Century” states that the “true Canonic musical experience requires knowing who wrote the piece one is hearing, knowing when they lived and knowing where they fit in the hierarchy of the Pantheon.” (Haynes, 2007)
Haynes writes that John Spitzer “…for his dissertation…traced the histories of works attributed to great composers that were later proved spurious; they disappeared from the repertoire when they lost their pedigrees.” (2007) Spitzer made the observation how “…when in 1964 they were re-ascribed to Hofstetter, Haydn’s Opus 3 string quartets began to disappear from the repertoire.” (in Haynes, 2007) Haynes states the opinion that it appears that “the label…is more important than the product.” (2007)
It is clear that labels do carry with them meaning that is and should well be applied in listening to musical composition for to fail to integrate the historical information and the time period information as well as the composer with the listening experience will leave the listener a little short of the pure enjoyment of the music for what it is as written in the time of the composer who composed the musical work. This study has shown that the accuracy of the human listener is not adequate although the human listener appears to be correct more than half of the time. This leaves this researcher wondering which of the musical compositions that have yet to be tested for accuracy have attributed wrongly the authorship to individuals who indeed were not the composers of those works and wondering then indeed who the real composer of the work might actually be. There is much more in the way of study in this area of attribution of authorship in musical composition prior to the late 18th and early 19th century, when it became important to know who the composer of music played in public performances indeed were.
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Haynes, Bruce (2007) The End of Early Music. Oxford University Press. US, 2007.