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:
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?
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.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 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?
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