Pablo Massa wrote:

>>I throw a glove: whom among listers would like to write or play a perfect
>>stylistic copy of any period?

This would be extremely difficult, and few would want to do it.  When
Ravel, confessing he was not much of a teacher, suggested to Vaughan
Williams that he supposed he could ask him to write a little minuet
in the style of Mozart, RVW replied that he had not resigned from a
comfortable job as organist to do something like that.  When RVW was
asked in the conservatory to write a waltz, to get bring him closer
to traditional diatonic music, he wrote a modal waltz.

Some of the most interesting works deliberately written to evoke older
styles, or from actual old themes, like Prokofief's Classical Symphony,
Stravinsky's Pulcinella, and Shapero's Symphony for Classical Orchestra,
could only have been written in the 20th Century, I think.  Warlock's
Capriol Suite and Respighi's Ancient Airs and Dances might come closer
to fooling the ear, but even they were written for modern ensembles.

Walter Meyer responded:

>Under my hypothesis, unless Mozart's works would be considered a
>pastiche of Haydn and M's other contemporaries, Mozart, now born in
>1956 but in my hypothesis composing only now the same works that he
>had in actuality composed two hundred years earlier, could not have
>composed pastiches.

Maybe I am lacking in imagination for having difficulty in making this
hypothesis (even mindful of a logic professor who once assured me that
one can hypothesize anything) but I want to say that this would be
impossible-- unless the Mozart born in 1956 had been carefully shielded
from all music composed since 1760 or so while being taught only the Music
of the mid-18th Century.

This is not to make any judgment on the music of the unfortunate
composition student who was sent away.

Jim Tobin