The Times view on Alma Deutscher’s call for beautiful music: Raise the Tone.

A young composer stresses melody in preference to noise.

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Monday May 02 2022, 9.00pm BST, The Times.

Alma Deutscher seeks audiences rather than disciples.

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Mozart began his career as a composer at the age of five, and Mendelssohn at the decidedly more mature milestone of ten. Alma Deutscher, aged 17, likewise possesses virtuosity well beyond her years, having premiered a violin concerto, a symphonic piece and an opera by her tenth birthday. Having been raised in Surrey, she now lives in Vienna and has amassed a big following of young people on the TikTok social media platform.

Perhaps as distinctive as Deutscher’s talent is her taste. To those new to classical music, she stresses the importance of melody in contrast to the ugliness she perceives in some modern music. She explains: “People who push noise down the throats of audiences and pass that off as music that only very educated people can understand — these are the people killing classical music.”

Concertgoers of all ages will surely nod in recognition. Atonality — that is, music without a sense of key or tonal centre — is an immense force in the music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and with good reason. Music develops, and atonality is not synonymous with being dissonant.

But it has to be said that some other modern movements do appear to have more devotees in the orchestra than the audience. Their music may have mathematical elegance without being easy on the ear. It takes an effort of will to, for example, sit through the evening-long performances of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s 1970s works with electronics such as Sternklang (which, according to the composer “is music for concentrated listening in meditation, for the sinking of the individual into the cosmic whole”).

By contrast, Deutscher seeks audiences rather than disciples. She is surely right to hold that the surest way to introduce her generation to the joys of classical music is to provide something beautiful rather than merely ingenious.