Friday, February 7, 2020

Alma Deutscher: Composer Prodigy

I first heard Alma Deutscher's music a couple of years ago. In this month's New Criterion, Heather MacDonald has a review and appreciation:
 Alma Deutscher rejects the last seventy years of non-tonal music theory and practice in favor of the deliberate search for musical beauty. She works within the harmonic tradition that unites Palestrina and Richard Strauss. As she explained in her Carnegie Hall program notes: “It has often been suggested to me . . . that as a modern composer I need to integrate more harshness, experimental noises, and unresolved dissonance into my compositions, in order to reflect the modern world. [But] there is enough ugliness in the world as it is, and I’ve never understood why I should add more ugliness to it with ugly music.” To the classical music press and composing establishment, them’s fightin’ words.
Yet every time Deutscher recounts her musical philosophy to an audience, it erupts in grateful agreement. Listeners are voting with their feet and flocking to her concerts, affording her an advantage enjoyed by few other contemporary composers: hearing her compositions performed multiple times by different orchestras. The typical new orchestral work today from the legions of academic composers turning out the latest manifestation of spectralism or integral serialism is performed once and then shelved forevermore, to almost no one’s regret but the composer’s.
I went through a bit of this myself. As a young performer one of my specialties was contemporary music and I did a bit of composing myself. But when I took up composing as a serious vocation, I went through an apostasy. On review, a lot of the more extreme avant garde works seemed to me to lack aesthetic value. Unfortunately I found that returning to an older tonal language was not a satisfactory solution either! If I was to approach composition seriously, I had to sort out the currents of the 20th (and 21st) century. Music, and the arts generally, did take some strange paths, but they were in reaction to events in the real world and you can't simply ignore them. Heather MacDonald, in the above quote, is picking on a straw man. Spectralism and integral serialism are hardly the mainstream in composition these days.

I think that what Alma Deutscher is doing is simply adopting a style of composition that was worked out in detail by composers a hundred and fifty years ago. If you do that you end up writing music that is sentimental kitsch--because instead of creating a musical style, you are simply borrowing one. I don't know how much recent music she is familiar with, perhaps very little. If you are completely unaware of Igor Stravinsky, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich, Sofia Gubaidulina and all the rest, then you are not quite a qualified member of the composer trade. But I'm sure that the very existence of Alma Deutscher, who has many admirers, is a sore trial for music critics. And if it is, then it is a sign that there is still a bit of music criticism left.

Listening to some excerpts from her recent Carnegie Hall concert, we hear rehashed Johann Strauss. Which is ok, of course, but it is after all, rehashed Johann Strauss. The only remarkable thing about it is that it was composed recently by a fourteen-year-old. So what we are actually buying here is not a new artwork, but a biography.


The really interesting thing will be how her career will progress over the next ten years. Will she still be writing Bruckner-lite? Or will she develop something of a style of her own?

29 comments:

Craig said...

"If you do that you end up writing music that is sentimental kitsch--because instead of creating a musical style, you are simply borrowing one."

I'm surprised to hear you making this argument. Sure, there are specific musical styles associated with particular times. That is how the musical tradition has developed, and, simply as an empirical observation, most composers have tended to write music in a style current in their own time and place. But I see no reason why a composer who loves, for instance, the music of Byrd and Victoria should not write music in that style. Why would that be kitsch? Surely the standard is musical excellence, not whether or not one moves with the times? Your argument above sound suspiciously close to the blather of Boulez and his bilious brotherhood. (Sorry, couldn't resist the alliteration.)

Bryan Townsend said...

I do try and surprise you now and then.

I anticipated a bit of pushback on this post. Here is the thing: this is actually a very interesting and complex question. If you go and listen to her models, Johann Strauss or other 19th century composers, I think you will sense a subtle difference. It comes back to Heraclitus' claim that you cannot step into the same stream twice. The stream is always moving. For the 19th century model composer, the stream is different because for him, he is stepping into it for the first time. There is a kind of tension or dynamic stress there that comes from the fact that the style, the "language" is fresh. Indeed, if it is a good 19th century composer, he is taking part in the construction of the style. In Alma Deutscher's music, what I have heard of it, there really is no substantial change to the basic style. This means that the level of internal tension in the music is different. She is operating in a zone that is entirely comfortable for her. Which is precisely the problem. You cannot step into the same stream twice.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

speaking of the 19th century, Douglas Shadle suggests canceling the 19th century in a piece that, since I've read his book Orchestrating the Nation, I know is not actually trolling. He wrote a full monograph on the ways music journalists and educators in the United States defined music in terms of Beethoven and Wagner to the exclusion of taking American symphonic works throughout the 19th century as having much value.

Which could be a way of saying that the boiling over of resentment at a Euro-centric symphonic canon has been percolating off and on within the United States in the composer scene for a century and a half, maybe.

But I am not so sure "canceling" the 19th century will work, especially when we consider that that's probably just a reference to conservatory requirements. I doubt anyone in Shadle's orbit means to say that canceling the 19th century means no more Scott Joplin, who had his breakthrough in the 1890s, after all.

Anonymous said...

"The really interesting thing will be how her career will progress over the next ten years. Will she develop something of a style of her own?"

Your question is often asked. However, Alma (or her father Guy Deutscher, who controls Alma’s career behind the scenes and likes to attack critics of his daughter's work on the internet) tends to interpret that question in the most negative way possible. You ask if she might develop an individual voice, she (or Guy) hears "Will Alma give up beauty and melody in exchange for current compositional expectations?"

Bryan Townsend said...

Wenatchee, yes, one of the important streams in music in the US has been resentment of the European models. Not surprising for a nation born in a war of independence! In popular music, the US has certainly triumphed, but it has achieved a fierce independence in concert music as well. One measure of this is the focus on the music of Morton Feldman at the Salzburg Festival later this year. People like George Crumb, John Cage, Steve Reich and Philip Glass are important figures in contemporary music with no real European equivalents. But it is certainly true that in the 19th century the US had not yet found its feet in classical music.

I'm sure he does answer criticism in that way! I think that when Alma speaks in public about beauty in music we are likely hearing her father's voice. For a very young person, she seems to have little curiosity or interest in music other than her own or her 19th century models.

James said...

I too am surprised by your assertion that Craig referenced and your response to him. Your argument is not unusual in itself, in fact I think the view that artistic quality is contextual is actually the norm in most musicology and post modern composition circles today. However I’m curious how you square that mentality with the notion you’ve advocated for many times here that works have of art have objective levels of quality.

Wouldn’t the logical conclusion of your view be that a work of art can only be judged in relation to the spot on the ‘river’ that it was created? Again not a particularly controversial viewpoint nowadays, but wouldn’t that mean that you couldn’t possibly make an aesthetic judgement without knowing something about the time, place and musical context that a work was created? If you just happened upon a piece of music that you had no idea when or where it came from, how could you possibly know if the composer was borrowing a style, if the music was derivative or original?

I understand the common feeling you mention here, that music like this is often just watered down compared to the original. However, here and in other posts you seem to make the stronger claim that any recourse to older styles or traditional tonal progressions inevitably fall into kitsch. I’m a little skeptical of that view as well, and I’d like to try and push back a bit with a thought experiment:

Suppose that Bach wrote a third book of the Well Tempered Clavier, another 24 preludes and fugues in a manuscript sitting somewhere undiscovered in a dusty Austrian attic. Then some talented harpsichordist today decides to write a set of preludes and fugues in every key, in the style of Bach which they know and love the best. So this harpsichordist’s set of 24 preludes and fugues now exists in the world, and now imagine that one of these fugues (Even though it’s a thought experiment I don’t want to stretch the suspension of disbelief too far) happens to be virtually a note for note copy of one of Bach’s fugues from his undiscovered 3rd book. So how would one judge the harpsichordists fugue? Would it just be kitsch imitating an earlier style? If a year later Bach’s third book was found, would his fugue be a masterpiece simply because of when it was written?

There’s all kinds of avenues of questioning you can go down with something like that, and of course thought experiments must always be taken with a large grain of salt but I do think it’s worth considering. After all, it’s totally within the realm of possibility that some previously unknown Ockeghem mass or Bach fugue turns up tomorrow. If one did, would it be new or old music? To me it’s totally fine if you want to say any such pieces were made in a specific context and should be valued accordingly, but it seems that if you want an objective standard you need something that can apply to a piece of music even if you don’t know anything about it’s provenance.

Bryan Townsend said...

Once again I am deeply impressed with the quality of commentary here. Thanks, James for your excellent observations. Let me first take up your comment that: "here and in other posts you seem to make the stronger claim that any recourse to older styles or traditional tonal progressions inevitably fall into kitsch." I don't think that is quite my position. Actually most new compositions reference to a greater or lesser extent, older styles. To take a couple of examples from Stravinsky, Taruskin has demonstrated the extensive use of Russian folk materials in Svadebka and the influence of Orthodox liturgy on Symphonies of Wind Instruments, two pieces that are usually considered to be among Stravinsky's more radical innovations. What saves these pieces from any suggestion of kitsch is the creative transformation of the materials.

Regarding your thought experiment: I think we need to make a distinction between the methods and goals of a composer and those of an antiquarian (as I would like to characterize your harpsichordist). A composer can be inspired by a historical style, as Stravinsky was in Pulcinella, and still create something new. The particular example that springs to mind is that of Shostakovich who wrote his own set of preludes and fugues in homage to Bach. No-one would mistake one of those for the Bach originals, again, because of a creative transformation. Our antiquarian would try as hard as possible to stick to exactly Bach's style but I somehow doubt that he would achieve the same level of quality. Counterpoint students are constantly writing exercises in strict adherence to Bach-style counterpoint, but I doubt they ever write anything as good.

This brings up another interesting issue. Doctoral candidates in musicology typically have to identify score excerpts in their comprehensive exams. You are confronted with a fragment of a score with no identifying marks and have to identify when it was composed to within a decade or so. If you can also identify the particular composer, so much the better. The fact that this is a standard exam question and can be answered successfully (given sufficient study!) tends to indicate that the context of a particular composition is rarely if ever unknown.

Another distinction that is needed to be made is between works that are good examples of a particular historical context and those that tend to transcend that context. The Bach Well-Tempered Clavier certainly transcends the context of early 18th century keyboard fugues as it is on a level considerably higher than its contemporaries. It is pieces like that that lead me to want to claim that there is such a thing as objective aesthetic quality,

Still, your thought experiment is fascinating. Has there ever been an instance of a piece of music being discovered that is so significant that it would transform in some way our understanding of music history or creativity or aesthetics? I don't recall any.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

James' thought experiment is intriguing to me since writing about cycles of preludes and fugues for solo guitar in the twenty-first century is one of my passions. We guitarists could be said to be roughly two centuries behind the keyboard literature in the realm of cycles of preludes and fugues. So what if someone were to transcribe a prelude and fugue for guitar into a piano format and we were looking at it without knowing it was written for guitar in this century? Would we assess it as successful in comparison to eighteenth century or nineteenth century keyboard literature? We could, and we might decide that a twentieth century cycle like Rekhin's falls a bit short using parallel fifths but parallel fifths are in some ways unavoidable in a key like E flat minor on solo guitar.

Something might be considered "bad" counterpoint in one era that is acceptable counterpoint in another. Anton Reicha's 36 fugues come to mind, of which Beethoven reportedly said "the fugue is no longer a fugue" but to my ears the fugue in A major with a 5/8 subject that gets its first answer in E flat major sounds fun and that set of fugues was composed around 1804.
Koshkin's Fugue in F minor has a subject that is answered at the tritone so while in the 21st century an answer at the tritone would be considered pretty normal in 1804 fugues were not quite in fashion and fugues with subjects answered at the tritone were so far out the norm they wouldn't come up in instruction in fugue unless said instruction was from Reicha, who also pointed out that judicious use of quarter tones could help enliven aria performances. It's one of those topics where I can't take Taruskin at face value when he wrote in Oxford History that Reicha gave the conservative standard approach to sonata form. Yeah, maybe, but at a larger level Reicha's approach to fugue was so unorthodox and his openness to what was a form of embryonic microtonality made him a somewhat iffy figure in the 19th century who Kyle Gann can mention fondly in his new book on the history of tunings and forerunners to microtonality. The Arithmetic of Listening is super cheap on Kindle, btw, and a fun read.


James said...

Thank you for your thoughtful reply, I have a few points I’d like to respond to if you’ll indulge another long post:

“I think we need to make a distinction between the methods and goals of a composer and those of an antiquarian”

Is that distinction really justifiable though? To me that just seems to lead down a ‘No True Scotsman’ alley as I’m not sure how we could really know for sure what a person’s goals and methods in writing music are. If they’ve written a piece of music that they intend to be performed and heard they can be considered a composer in my mind. I hear your point about transforming the material but that still seems to rely on a subjective feel and preference for what the right amount of change and difference from previous music is.

“Our antiquarian would try as hard as possible to stick to exactly Bach's style but I somehow doubt that he would achieve the same level of quality.”

I too would consider it very unlikely but I don’t rule it out altogether. In my imagined scenario, one of the fugues turns out to be the same as one of Bach’s so it must be the same level of quality. Obviously that’s a fanciful suggestion but I’m not so confident that a really talented early musician steeped in Baroque counterpoint couldn’t fool us with an imitation, whether it was done purely as an exercise or deeply personal expression (which we could never know for sure anyways). Another tangential question that your phrasing brings to mind: Would a musician who closely studied a variety of composers from the period (Reincken, Buxtehude, the Couperins, etc.) and then started writing music drawing from all those influences be a more legitimate composer in your eyes than one who studied Bach exclusively and writes music in the style of Bach?


I’m familiar with the exams you mention and have had to take several, and so I can say with some confidence that they tend to follow a well established narrative of lineage (Meaning curveballs like a later 20th century piece by Mompou won’t come up on a 20th century history exam) and focus on making sure you recognize broad stylistic tropes and the stereotypical quirks of canonic composers more than anything else. That is to say, I think that they would have no problem fooling students (or experienced experts) if they wanted to.

My main musical interests lie in the 15-16th centuries and I can tell you the the problems there of dating things and saying who’s influencing who is really messy. To make the whole matter even more complicated nowadays we’re just so inundated with music from so many places and eras (and thus new music influenced by all that), I think it will just keep getting harder and harder to blindly identify pieces in that way.I can’t imagine how student 100 years from now could place pieces from Caroline Shaw, Terry Riley, Ben Johnston, Kaija Saariaho, Tristan Murail, and Jennifer Higdon (completely random group I think you could pick names out of a hat) in chronological order down to the decade.

For your final question I would say Bach is actually probably the best example of something like that. Not that his music was ever totally lost but I think it’s reasonable to argue that his music was more widely known and had more influence on 20th century music than it did at any time beforehand. I recall some comment from Glenn Gould about how the 1930s were really the decade of Bach and I think it’s definitely true that your average classical musician in 1930 knew way more of Bach’s music than one in 1830 or even 1730. Personally, I’d say that a substantial portion of the best music from the 15-16th centuries hasn’t even been recorded (let alone performed and recorded well), and I think it’s likely that there’s all kinds of incredible music out there but unfortunately I think there’s just a lot working against it ever coming to light in a way that creates any substantial shift like you mention.

Wenatchee the Hatchet said...

That last point about Bach having more influence in the 20th than in his own time is a good point. From Zaderatsky's preludes and fugues written on telegram cards in the Gulag in the 1930s up through Henry Martin's later 1990s Preludes and Fugues cycle we probably have more extensive cycles of preludes and fugues in the 20th century than we ever get taught about from J. S. Bach's lifetime. But has ANYONE recorded all of David Diamond's Preludes and Fugues, for instance?

Maury said...

I will second Bryan and say this is a well thought discussion.

For James,
Bryan and I had a short discussion on some older posts which got into the question of masterpieces. I argued that the idea of masterpieces is a term used by critics and academics far more than the public. For example, there are wide critical consensus on writers poets and composers that are ignored by the public. In other words, masterpieces that hardly anyone reads or listens to. We have to accept that while art has objective elements our opinions of its merit are simply subjective judgments. We can objectively state that this work has greater complexity than that work along some dimension but have to make a subjective judgment as to the merit of that complexity. Subjective judgments can be aggregated to achieve greater reliability but not greater objectivity. Since we are all humans though we are necessarily going to share to a great extent cognitive and perceptual abilities which lead to consensus. A Martian though might think we are all boors.

So I don't think that the main issue is whether this or that musical work is objectively eternally better than some other work but that we not overturn our consensus of quality based on some other factor say the way the musicians dress or their native language or PC factors etc etc that are irrelevant to artistic quality. Bryan has argued consistently I think that it is in the audience where we see the preference for perceived quality over the other non quality factors I pointed to.

As for the temporal sequence of music history I think that this was a function of textbook arrangement that critics adopted in the Age of Progress. I agree with you that given the internet that people growing up today may not have the same perception of temporal sequence that we have. They may arrange music along certain categories or attributes rather than the year it was created. I think it may become harder and harder to date something based simply on the arrangement of tones in the work.

Bryan Townsend said...

What an excellent discussion! Wenatchee, you remind me that it is likely time for me to re-read the Oxford history.

Yes, James, it seems I was engaging in a bit of mind-reading in distinguishing the composer from the antiquarian. But with goals as different as, on the one hand, to explore some new musical possibilities as opposed to, on the other hand, to recreate some already realized possibilities, the end product is likely to be radically different. But it is an interesting thought to say, what if someone makes the choice of inserting themselves into a particular point in music history to see what might come of that? In a sense, Stravinsky did something similar when he inserted himself into the context of Russian folklore and came up with a number of different solutions during his Swiss period. And what was Bach doing in his B minor mass but inserting himself into the long tradition of the Catholic mass, a tradition that he was not really part of as a Lutheran?

Your point about the score identification questions on the comprehensive exams is a good one. You are undoubtedly correct, that they are not meant to confound the candidate, but to elicit recognition of broad stylistic traits. And as you and Maury both suggest, this could get more and more impossible given the global nature of recent music availability.

But isn't the sheer messiness of the current landscape simply due to the fact that history is in the process of weighing in? It seems pretty clear who were the really important composers of the first quarter of the 20th century and which works were the really significant ones. In a hundred years won't the current scene be a lot easier to understand? And wouldn't the 15th and 16th century repertoires start to sort themselves out given a lot more exposure over time?

Given the spectrum between aesthetic quality being determined by the immediate historical context and being an eternal, objective quality, I think we have to come down for some kind of moderate balance. Or so Aristotle might suggest! We might be wildly mistaken about a particular piece because we simply don't understand the context or are unaware of it. This might become clearer over time. Or, on the contrary, we might over time find a particular genre or context to be inherently tiresome and of less and less aesthetic value to us. That's why the canon is always in flux.

I forget the exact terms, but Taruskina and others refer to two canons: that of the specialists or academics and that of the general public. Stravinsky's Svadebka and Symphonies of Winds are in the former canon but not the latter while his Rite of Spring is in both.

After all this discussion, what are we going to say about the music of Alma Deutscher at the end of the day? Wherein does it's aesthetic value lie? What is its real context?

Maury said...

"After all this discussion, what are we going to say about the music of Alma Deutscher at the end of the day? Wherein does it's aesthetic value lie? What is its real context?"

The most obvious aspect of Alma is her youth, not her stylistic imitation. Other very youthful composers got some press too, even preinternet. Let's do another thought experiment. A composer musicologist finds in an old attic 50 compositions by a hitherto unknown reclusive classical composer. The musicologist is fascinated by the quality and individual style of these works and closely studies them and creates another work exactly in that style. The musicologist then has his piece performed while keeping secret the works he discovered. What is the aesthetic value of the musicologist's work? Does its aesthetic value change if he reveals the previous 50 works and if so why?

Sheer stylistic imitation only works for very recent material mostly in the pop world because the focus is more on the performer than the material. Otherwise too close imitation seems too close to plagiarism. But that is a current psycho/social issue more than an aesthetic issue. In a society which insisted artists remain anonymous would close imitation matter?

Bryan Townsend said...

Your thought experiment almost sounds like Stravinsky composing Pulcinella using themes from Pergolesi and Gallo. But he made significant alternations to the whole harmonic structure.

Historically, before the individual composer's copyrights became important, yes, imitation was common.

I think the fundamental issue here however is the aesthetic character of Alma Deutscher's compositions versus her models. Somewhere I think I make the comment that they lack something important that the originals had.

Maury said...

I don't doubt your basic assertion that as a practical matter close imitation of past styles will not produce works of high quality. Part of the issue is that the stylistic rules were not codified or precisely known until after the style was no longer active. So as you say the original composers were creating the rules not copying them. Having the style book inevitably changes subsequent composer's works who closely follow it.

However aesthetic value is independent of the provenance or method of creation of a work. If the proverbial monkey randomly types out a great literary work, we won't give the monkey much credit but it will still be a great literary work.

Bryan Townsend said...

Yes, this is a curious thing about the performing arts as opposed to the plastic arts. The provenance of a painting by da Vinci is where an enormous part of the supposed aesthetic value lies (at least, at auction), while the provenance of a piece of music is far less important. The proof of that pudding is in the concert hall.

Anonymous said...

Her father Guy Deutscher made a huge fool of himself recently, by committing huge linguisting no-no's in order to try and force an argument in his direction.
See comments here:
https://slippedisc.com/2020/01/salzburg-commissions-opera-from-14-year-old/

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks, Anon. And wow, the father is quite the character. There is a real danger of him over-controlling and possibly ruining her career. Let's hope he doesn't discover the Music Salon!

Kevin Scott said...

My major concern with Alma Deutscher is that either her, or her father, or both, have not done their homework in terms of what "new music" is all about. Because they have lived in Europe they have heard one avenue of new music, namely post-World War 2 angst-ridden post-serial compositions picking up where Schoenberg, Berg and Webern left off. So it comes as no surprise that our little "heroine" of contemporary music feels off-put by the likes of Boulez, Stockhausen and other composers of the Darmstadt or IRCAM variety, and no doubt she would also be turned off by fellow Britons such as Birtwistle, Goehr, Knussen, Lutyens, Maxwell Davies and Searle.

But what of the tonal composers out there who continue to write what she perceives as "beautiful"? Surely she can't deny the music of John Rutter, or even his American contemporaries such as Dan Forrest and Eric Whitacre. And when it comes to contemporary tonal music, why isn't she exploring the likes of Adolphus Hailstork, Jennifer Higdon, Jessie Montgomery, John Mackey, or even more recognizable names like John Adams or John Corigliano? Is it because they've all been lumped in as atonal modernists? Composers who simply refuse to revisit the past the way Alma does? The finale of Corigliano's clarinet concerto would send shivers down her spine with its collage of Polish school techniques enveloping a Gabrieli canzona for antiphonal brass, and Hailstork's first symphony is a new take on the classical symphony with its allusions to gospel and funk.

One last thought: Alma has written two lengthy concertos, but while they do explore the structural terrain, the melodic and contrapuntal elements still smack, at best, of mid-19th century romanticism with a hint of the cinema. But her harmonic language could use some serious updating; she hasn't even ventured into the world of Debussy, Scriabin or even Rachmaninoff. Until she composes a work as adventurous as Korngold's youthful Sinfonietta, which he wrote at the age of fifteen, she has yet to really compose a work that says she has her own voice, and for the record, Richard Strauss also plays an influence on the young Korngold.

Bryan Townsend said...

Kevin, thanks for your late addition to the discussion. Some very good points. I am very curious as to what Alma Deutscher might be composing, say, five years from now. Will she find her own voice and what influences with it reveal? Will she come to terms with the more contemporary style?

Kevin Scott said...

You are welcome, Bryan. What will Alma compose five, let alone ten, years from now? If her father continues being a controlling force in her life, we'll only hear more Strauss-lite from her pen. But once she hits eighteen, will she have a love interest? Will she finally find herself at the crossroads of contemporary music and have to deal with it?

It is already known that Jörg Widmann has been a bit of a mentor to her, which is interesting when one hears his music, but apparently these strange bedfellows, with a generation gap between them, have bonded in some weird way. That we know Alma has a yen for Richard Strauss is obvious, but one has never asked her about other composers from that period (Korngold, Schreker, Gal and others who did not follow Schoenberg's lead), or even about the music of Elgar, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Bax, Walton or even someone like George Lloyd whose music she could readily identify with.

If she cuts herself off from "daddy dearest", or he stops acting like the male equivalent of Mama Rose Hovick (mother of Gypsy Rose Lee for those not familiar with her) and finds a mentor who will lead her to different avenues of music that she can find enticing and inspirational, I presume we will see a mature Alma whose melodic language may remain the same, but with a tougher, slightly modernist veneer to it. Otherwise she will peter out in a matter of years until she realizes that her music is an anomaly to not only the evil in our world, but also the good.

Bryan Townsend said...

I also wonder if the whole musical world will come out of the pandemic rather different than it was before?

Tom Nelson said...

A more interesting question would be why the world of classical music is continuously discussing whether a 14 year old student of music has found her own voice yet or why her choice of style at this young age is even controversial. I've heard composing is a life journey. It can't be that bad starting the journey mastering Schubert, Mendelssohn and Richard Strauss.

I just find it fascinating how it appears that the young lady already has some degree of relevance in the world of classical music and matters enough to warrant numerous discussions over the years about her choice of style or something she said about modern music. Does this happen in other art forms?

Is it just a testament to her presumed immense talent(people can't help themselves having an opinion?) or does it say more about the classical music community?

Bryan Townsend said...

I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but yes, the "child prodigy" phenomenon has special relevance in classical music because of people like Mozart, Mendelssohn and Schubert (though he was a tad older). It is also something of a phenomenon in mathematics and chess, I believe. Not really much of a thing in other fields.

Kevin Scott said...

Well...the difference between someone like Alma, and someone like the up-and-coming Quinn Mason (who can no longer be considered a child prodigy), is that Alma has a major publicity machine behind her, while Quinn has been making the rounds with orchestras and chamber ensembles here in the States.

Quinn penned several symphonies and other orchestral, band and chamber works during his teenage years while learning his craft, culminating with a large-scale programmatic symphony in his senior year entitled "The Quiet Girl", the kind of work one would expect not from a high school student but a third or fourth year college undergraduate.

And yes, Quinn's influences are many, yet he is able to tool those models into a sound all his own. His officially numbered second symphony, a five-movement work in E minor, pays homage to two other great symphonies in that key, namely those by Tchaikovsky and Sibelius, but yet you also hear the spirits of Stravinsky and William Grant Still in his writing. He has since moved on from the late romantics and early modernists as he has incorporated minimalism and more pan-tonal elements into his writing as his own sound is continually maturing.

Alma, we hope, can follow such a path by hearing more music of the twentieth century as well as her contemporaries. One does not have to like what they're hearing for the most part, but will find something of value in works by her peers that will continue her growth as a composer, just as Rachmaninoff did when he heard the likes of Les Six, Bartok, Gershwin and Stravinsky.

And if she does feel comfortable writing in a proto-classical/romantic idiom, one hopes she will continue to find new ground within that avenue.

Bryan Townsend said...

Thanks for bringing Quinn Mason to my attention! I will listen to some of his music on YouTube.

nick said...

It seems many commenters want Alma to change her style etc. As long as she is filling seats, and is happy with her work, why should she?

Kevin Scott said...

If she could grow more as a composer by sticking to her idiom and refining it, then I agree with you - why should she change her style?

The problem is that unless you know how to forge ahead and find new things to say with it, it will only stagnate her growth. Many composers always listen to their contemporaries, and even though some may not like what they hear on the whole, there is always one or two things that would capture one's ear and use those sounds on their own terms.

We've seen this with Rachmaninoff once he heard Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Gershwin and Les Six (Poulenc, Milhaud, Honegger, Auric, Tailleferre and Durey) how it further infused his own music and he did it on his own terms, and the same can be said for Puccini who listened not only to Richard Strauss and Claude Debussy, but also Schoenberg and Stravinsky. He may not have liked a lot of music the latter two composers wrote, but he was able to find things they had to say that attracted him to incorporate some of their stylistic traits in a way where it enhanced his personal sound.

Alma has only been exposed to one avenue of new music, predominantly the post-serial and experimental schools that continue to rule the roost in Europe, whereas in America there are several avenues of contemporary music, one of them being neo-tonal and even neo-romantic. If she heard several of those composers, she would find that she has more in common with them than with her European counterparts.

Yet if she chooses to write music that harkens back to a bygone era, more power to her, but sooner or later she's going to have to start hearing more of her contemporaries and decide which avenue to choose and use to help infuse her own personal sound.

Anonymous said...

I'm listening to the 2nd movement of Alma Deutscher's piano concerto right now. IMHO, it is well-constructed, thoughtful and has some poignant moments but the only significance I see in this is that it was written by a teenager. So then one would have to compare it to other pieces written by prodigies. Mendelssohn's Octet comes to mind. That is unquestionably a brilliant piece, which I don't feel Deutscher's is. I know a 14-year old Korean boy I have taught who writes and plays long extravagant piano pieces in the style of Liszt. I think he is remarkable. Deutscher was remarkable for her age when she began, but I hope that her compositions will grow in depth, rather than recycling the sounds of the past without adding anything new to them. With 700 years of Western music to listen to at a click, there are better pieces to choose from. Sorry to be a curmudgeon. Part of the reason I gave up being a working music critic (I was courted by the NY Times at one point). I have been a working composer for fifty years now and some of my music is unabashedly old-fashioned, but it is mostly in the service of classic silent films and for that it seems appropriate. I wouldn't make people listen to it as concert pieces. Maybe Deutscher could have a career in film music.