![]() ![]() Mozart's and Mendelssohn's compositions from their childhood years don't compare favorably with their mature works. The first thing to say about this is that she is 15. The second, more serious criticism of Miss Deutscher is that as a composer she is a mere savant-capable of producing ersatz versions of the canonical works of Western music but in no way saying anything new or original or interesting. First, that is she is one more child prodigy of the kind we see come and go all the time-exploited by the music industry and a public eager for emotionally shallow works of imitation art. Their usually off-the-record complaint has two parts. Nobody wants to go on record criticizing a child, but Miss Deutscher is not embraced by the music world's influencers. ![]() ![]() That, for the cultural elite of Europe and North America, is the problem. Her music doesn't "sound like" any one composer but bears the marks of many-Mendelssohn and Mozart, for sure, but also Bach, Georges Bizet and Richard Strauss. You will know it if you're passably familiar with classical music from the 18th, 19th and early 20th centuries and listen to Miss Deutscher's orchestral works without knowing who wrote them. That she has studied the old masters is plainly true. She writes music that people want to hear: orchestral and chamber works that ordinary listeners-those who aren't invested in the "serious" music industry-actually like. But none have done so in quite the guileless manner of English composer Alma Deutscher. Some recent composers have resisted the tendency to equate serious with dissonant or difficult-Arvo Pärt in Estonia, the late Dominick Argento in America. Every fan of classical music knows the feeling of seeing a contemporary composer on the program and inwardly despairing. But the overall incoherence is undeniable. The causes are many and complex: the abiding influence of atonal music from earlier in the century, the obsession with originality and shock value, the gradual transformation of classical music into a faux-scientific academic discipline. Many individual composers continued writing works of enduring value, but the great preponderance of classical music written over the past 75 years is deliberately opaque and aggressively ugly. You may be called a reactionary or a nostalgist if you acknowledge this fact aloud, but every concertgoer knows it. Something terrible happened to classical music during the 20th century, and especially after 1945. On Saturday the same newspaper carried a follow-up interview with the 15-year old Alma Deutscher by journalist Barton Swaim, who gives his interview with the young musician the title " A Girl Makes Music Without Irony or Ugliness," which to me sounds like he wants to start a brawling brouhaha about The Emancipation of the Dissonance.and he does! Nearly seven years ago I started this topic with an article from The Wall Street Journal about 8-year old Wunderkind Alma Deutscher. "I made up my own land with its own language and there are beautiful composers there, named Antonin Yellowsink and Ashy and Shell and Flara," she says. She says she gets her inspiration from an imaginary country called Transylvanian. Then she plays them for her father, Guy Deutscher, a linguist and amateur flutist, who records them. Alma, who lives in Surrey, England, says the melodies "pour into her head" while she's swinging or skipping rope. It would be boring if I did the same thing!" doesn't like being called "Little Miss Mozart" because "for one thing I'm not little, I'm a very big girl, and for another thing I don't want to write what he wrote. Now, at 8, she has her own CD of works she composed, drawing, apparently unwanted, comparisons to Mozart. Before she was 2, Alma Deutscher was singing with perfect pitch. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |