London professor completes Mozart’s unfinished works

A British music professor has completed Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s unfinished works.

Timothy Jones, who teaches at London’s Royal Academy of Music, released an album last Friday filled with pieces he finished for the 18th-century master, according to CBC Radio.

"I mean, I think I'm a bit presumptuous to have done this, in a way," the British musicologist and Mozart expert told As It Happens host Carol Off. "But I'm not trying to write fake Mozart and I'm not trying to sort of put myself on a pedestal next to him."

The whole project began 10 years ago, Jones said.

"I was writing a book that was quite boringly technical about how Mozart's music is very expressive and dynamic. And I became particularly interested in trying to figure out what I could learn from the music he hadn't finished, as well as the pieces that he had," he said.

He had plenty to work with. In the last decade of his life alone, Mozart wrote more than 100 fragments of compositions that he never completed.

"I found I could possibly say more efficiently what I wanted to know about these fragments in notes rather than in words," he said.

Jones isn't disclosing to listeners which parts of the recordings are Mozart's and which are his.

"That's a great guessing game that they'll have to play, I think, is where Mozart stops and I start," he said.

"There have been plenty of instances in the last seven years or so where quite well-known musicians have been playing some of these completions, and they've either said, 'Oh, I think you've gone wrong there,' and it turns out it's something that Mozart wrote. Or occasionally — and it's very nice when this happens — they'll say, 'Oh I particularly like what Mozart did at that point.' And it turns out it's me rather than Mozart."