I can only speak from my limited musical experience, but from what I hear, I think she definitely has a very deep understanding of what she's doing, and assuming she's properly taught, her talents are honed well, and that this is what she ultimately wants to do with her life, I'd be very surprised if she didn't blossom into an excellent composer in the next decade or so. Time will tell, of course.
If there's any criticism, I guess I'd say that there's a certain lack of inventiveness to the music. It tends to be a little too "perfect". I'm not really hearing any of the unexpected twists which make for good drama, and if there are (like the minor section in her Rondino), they sort of end as if they never really happened. More than what I would expect from many composers three times her age, however! She has plenty of time to learn.
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I really must disagree with what's being implied about her style being outdated, and that she'll "grow out of it eventually" as if it's a childish phase.
Violadude said that comparisons with Beethoven (as a child) are inappropriate because Beethoven was writing in a new style at the time. From what I know, in the late 18th century, there was little to no widespread knowledge of significantly older music (or non-Western music, for that matter) as there is today. If you were performing music, it was more than likely going to be music written in the past few years within your own country, because 99.9% of the time that's what they were constantly surrounded with (more than we are with pop music today, I'd argue), whether they liked it or not. At the time, a composition written more than just a few years beforehand would be considered outdated! This only began to change in the late 18th and early 19th centuries with conductors like Mozart and Mendelssohn working to bring Baroque masterpieces to the public's attention again, which created a sense of a more permanent repertoire that could be built upon. As a child, I would argue that Beethoven wrote in the style that he did because he had very little choice in the matter! As he was familiar with the Well-Tempered Clavier, he could have written in a more Bachian style, arguably? (
Like the young Mendelssohn I guess)
Though the idea of a repertoire grew steadily in the 19th century, the vast majority of classical composers up until the 20th century were writing music which was intended to be functional and commercial. Mozart, for instance, wrote divertimenti as background music for events, minuets and contradanses to be danced to, operas/symphonies/concerti for an evening's entertainment, sonatas to be published for home use etc., and as such, Mozart had to follow the fashion and tastes he was writing for. You can clearly hear Mozart accounting for these tastes and fashions if you listen to the differences between a
work written for Paris,
a work written for Salzburg,
a work written for Vienna,
a work written for Prague,
and a work written for the church in a more archaic style. The music had to sell, or you would starve. Unless you were a well-off composer like Beethoven became in his later years, you simply had no choice in the matter as a professional. Similarly, if you're a composer for film/games/media today, or a record producer for an artist, you would never get away with writing beyond certain stylistic guidelines.
Today however, if you listen to classical music at all, it could be classical music written anywhere from yesterday to thousands of years ago, and whether you like it or not, there would seem to be quite a few people who prefer the older stuff to the newer stuff, and to expect a composer of those tastes to completely disregard the music that they grew up loving, living and breathing in favor of writing in a variant of whatever style currently happens to in fashion with a circle of "real" contemporary composers in order to be considered a serious or contemporary composer at all is a little arrogant in my opinion.
Even if you think that a talented composer choosing to write in an older style is a waste of their talents because they're not breaking their new grounds, I think it's worth asking if they would really be so enthusiastic about composing if they were forced to do so.
Classical music today finally has the opportunity to transcend its old shell of functionality and fashion once and for all, but only if you will allow it to. With the freedoms granted by the internet, composers are now finally free to do whatever they want (and listeners now have a virtually unlimited choice of what they can listen to!). There is no one true style, and I think to suggest that a composer can't be considered serious or contemporary if they utilize that freedom to write the music they truly want to write is very unfair. To me, it seems as silly as suggesting someone living in America (of non-Indian descent) can't write real Indian classical music because they're not Indian.
If you think that it's somehow artistically invalid to experiment with older styles, using the late 18th century style as an example, I'd encourage you to listen to some of Mozart's unfinished works. I find many of them heartbreakingly (considering their state) beautiful. If you love the music of Mozart as much as I do (and by extension, his musical style and parlance), if there was even the smallest chance of a genius like him arising again (even to only write one more great work), would you not do everything you could to support and encourage them? It feels like there's much more which remains to be said:
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(The last few minutes are a second-rate completion)
I also feel the need to point out that when Mozart was first introduced to the music of JS Bach,
he wrote music in a Bachian style for his own pleasure (and presumably to impress his friend von Swieten, who collected older music and first introduced Mozart to it). Beethoven adored Bach, and as we know, he started writing fugues into his later works at a time when they weren't necessarily fashionable (not to mention his interests in archaic church modes which he used in his Missa Solemnis). A composer hears something they enjoy, and they eventually incorporate elements of what they discovered into their own musical languages (which, in the case of Mozart and Beethoven, were in line with the fashions required at the time). This is nothing new, and it would seem that it leads to good things. It didn't hold their music back. Let it happen, I say.
I hope that Deutscher will write the music she
wants to write, and if that eventually happens to be what is considered contemporary, so be it, but please don't deny her the artistic freedom she deserves.