One thing is certain: given her age, Deutscher’s musical voice and imagination are extraordinary – and to be celebrated, especially in an age when we are constantly hearing that classical music has no relevance to today’s youth.
(Even Stephen Hawking, who was in the audience, seemed charmed although he refrained to comment about whether the music had changed his view of the universe.) My whole life is changed, my entire view of the universe.” At our interview, at Google’s Zeitgeist conference, the audience of Europe’s most sophisticated minds was bowled over by her brilliance. On her YouTube channel, the comments include lines such as “You are going to change the world!” or “the word ‘genius’ is pathetically inadequate. Make of her music what you will, but Deutscher has evidently been instinctively fluent in such fundamentals since she was tiny her father Guy admitted to me that she was singing before she was talking. In his 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard University, Leonard Bernstein described musical tonality as ‘that universal earth’ from which everything springs and he echoed Noam Chomsky's theory of a ‘universal grammar’ to build a case for tonal music as an inherently natural language in which melody functions as a noun, harmony as adjective, and musical metre as verb. It is, therefore, probable that the imitation of musical cries by articulate sounds may have given rise to words.” would have expressed various emotions, such as love, jealousy, triumph. “Primeval man, or rather some early progenitor of man, probably first used his voice in producing true musical cadences, that is in singing,” he wrote. In The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin explored the possibility of a musical proto-language. But the assumption that children are by definition not emotionally mature enough to grasp the complexities of great classical works, let alone create them, underestimates the human propensity for music which we have from birth, or even earlier. It is true that most ten-year-olds are unlikely to be pushing boundaries of tonality and form, and that the more years they spend immersed in making music, the more their sensibilities will likely be refined as they master their craft.
“The only things that are left for even the most brilliant of them are reheated gestures from a museum.” “What can be said for certain is that serious art music could never be written by a child,” argued critic and novelist Philip Hensher in 2007, upon hearing Symphony no 5 by Jay Greenberg, the Juilliard-educated prodigy who was then aged 15. People can be very cynical about modern child prodigies – hence the slightly sneering ‘Little Miss’ epithet. My parents didn’t understand why I was so tired in the morning and didn’t want to get up!” “I woke up and I didn’t want to lose the melodies so I took my notebook and wrote it all down, which took almost three hours.
Two years ago, in the middle of the night, an entire set of piano variations in E-flat announced itself to her subconscious. “Sometimes it might be a human voice singing, sometimes a piano, sometimes a violin.” “Even when I’m trying to do something else, when people are talking to me about something completely different, I get these beautiful melodies that play inside my mind,” she told me.
The British girl is being described as ‘Little Miss Mozart’, not only because of her precocious talents, but because of her inspirations, namely: “Mozart, Schubert and Tchaikovsky - the composers of the most beautiful melodies ever written.”Īs a composer, Deutscher is brimming with charming melodies, which often arrive unbidden and fully formed. A composer of piano and violin sonatas, string quartets and lately a full-length opera, Deutscher also plays the violin and piano superbly – and has recently turned ten. This week, I had the pleasure of interviewing Alma Deutscher.
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