I don't like saving files on my machine, Baz. I might forget they're there and still be stuck with them several months later, and I'm trying to cut down on things like that. I prefer just to listen straight off if I can - there are enough other things in my life that can't be done straight away.

Thank you all who have used rapidshare as well as sendspace.  I now feel very guilty that I am so ignorant not to give you the answers but at least I have heard them.

Stuart - I can't help thinking 14 is Stravinsky, but I don't know what.

Tommo

Puts on Poker face. 14 is Jeu de Cartes, Stravinsky indeed. Must admit I am not sure which deal.

No worries, stuart. I'm not doing the competition. Though I guess I am sort of competing with Richard for the Alan Davies cup.

A few very vague musings about the outstanding excerpts:
7 probably something of Haydn - perhaps one of his innumerable symphonies;
11 French and nineteenth-century - since we are told it is some one's very early work, how about Debussy or Satie?
12 seems not to be Chaicoffsci (although the last few seconds do sound like him), nor anything we know of Glazunoff or Fauré - so what? - perhaps Stanford;
14 an odd mixture of expressive string harmonies interspersed with "jazz" - but too beautiful and straightforward (the non-jazz part we mean) for Stravinsky himself we think;
16 what an interesting style! - a contemporary of Schumann? - some one a little under Berlioz's influence?
18 beautiful sixteenth-century polyphonic strains - English perhaps - but not quite like either Tallis or Byrd;
19 in the style of Shostacowitch but better than he;
20 something modern for piano - definitely not Messiaen - nor Mompou based on what little we have heard of his.

Some interesting ideas from Mr Grew regarding these puzzles. No.11 is not French, but German, despite its frivolous nature!

No.16 was actually solved late last night by Member Martle - it is nowhere near the mid 19th Century, but from 'Ash' by Michael Torke (1989)!

No.19 Better than Shostakovitch?!!  

Evidently Mr. Now is a man of the moment. Yet there is something to be said for collection and retention. Asbjørn Schaathun though


is not the man to say it. We have been listening to his work for piano and electronics entitled "How Time Alters Matter" - very philosophical no doubt - but found most of its twenty-nine minutes unconsciously comic. It begins with a loud chord on the piano. For the following fifteen seconds nothing else happens; then the loud chord is repeated. We are supposed to savour the decay no doubt; for for the following twenty seconds nothing else happens; then the loud chord is repeated again. The first minute and a half contain in all only three isolated chords so it gets off to a terrible start! Except in the final five minutes when all of a sudden it turns into Rachmaninoff in the style of Stockhausen (or vice versa) the work is pretty much like that all the way through and we regret that we cannot possibly recommend it to Members. Does any one else know it?

I realise that whatever I say is very unlikely to convince Messrs Baz and Grew, but I regard Asbjørn Schaathun as one of the more interesting composers active today, producing work of consistently high quality and originality (and, as perspicacious Members will no doubt already have suspected, sounding nothing like either Stockhausen or Rackmarninoff) regardless of the tilt of his spectacles.