> Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote th

> Obviously it's a bit late now, but it would have been an interesting experiment - to ask 100 "professors of music" to guess which composer out of [1] wrote this newly discovered piece. They'd have guessed correctly. But you already know ahead of time that this newly discovered piece is not, say, juvenilia written by Scriabin specifically to imitate a Chopin waltz. And in that case, 100 professors would have guessed wrong because it would not have been the obvious answer. Guessing composers based on sound/musical content alone is problematic for many reasons: 1. Common practice vs. composer's idiosyncrasies. Even separating Mozart's oeuvre from Michael Haydn's (Joseph's brother) has been non-trivial-- scholars have gotten it wrong over the centuries. Also-- IIRC there is a research paper about stylistic analyses leading to circular dependencies in the attribution of works of Josquin. E.g., A is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's B, and B is Josquin because it sounds like Josquin's A... 2. Cross-contamination. Mozart knew Michael and his music, and was highly influenced by it. Compare the initial fugue at the beginning of Haydn's Requiem in C minor to Mozart's, plus the upward cascade of vocal entrances. Additionally, Schumann was influenced by Chopin, who was influenced by Liszt/Schumann/Mozart/Bach/etc. The problem gets worse as you go forward in history-- the next generation can take a composer's entire output and use it as their bible, which leads to... 3. Experts are also composers, and the most highly trained ones can write in the style of any composer whose works they have access to. E.g., Scriabin's set of Preludes was obviously written to be the sequel to Chopin's Op. 24 Preludes, (e.g., Chopin's no. 1 has a few fleeting quintuplets at the end, Scriabin's no. 1 is OMG all quintuplets phrased across barlines till the very end [engine_revving.wav]!). He understood Chopin's formal and textural affinities, could match his virtuosity at the keyboard, and fully immersed himself in Chopin's harmonic language. I have no doubt if Scriabin had wanted to do a prank (or, more likely, an exercise) by writing a piece to fall convincingly into Chopin's oeuvre, he could have done so at any point in his career. Plus... 4. Confirmation bias. I really want this to be a newly discovered waltz by Chopin![1] These are the reasons an article like this mentions things like paper, ink and handwriting analysis. 1: Digression-- scholars also like to omit things that they feel don't reflect well on their favorite composer. For a fun example, see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mozart_and_scatology