US Teenager's Analysis Suggests Mozart's Music Is Least Predictable Among Canonical Composers

A US student has applied pattern analysis to compositions by four canonical composers in an attempt to identify what distinguishes Mozart's music from that of his peers, according to a report by The Guardian.

Linus Chen-Plotkin's analysis reportedly found that Mozart's music moves in the least predictable way among the composers studied, the newspaper said, describing the finding as a fresh contribution to a question that has occupied musical thinkers for centuries.

The Guardian frames the question as one that has long divided academic disciplines devoted to music analysis and historical musicology, as well as informing debates over the formation of classical music's canon of "great" composers. Central to that debate, the report says, is whether it can be demonstrated that Mozart was measurably "better" than other composers, rather than simply a matter of taste or convention.

According to the report, listeners' instinctive sense of the "sensual magic" of Mozart's music is only part of what scholars have tried to explain. The Guardian notes that a more elusive puzzle is why his pieces are able to sustain repeated listening over a lifetime without their pleasures fading, and why they can still seem surprising even to listeners who know them intimately — a question the paper describes as the "million-dollar" issue in musicology.

The full details of Chen-Plotkin's methodology, the identities of the other three composers examined, and the broader implications of the findings were not fully specified in the available excerpt of the report. The Guardian's coverage presents the analysis as a notable attempt by a young researcher to address a question that has challenged generations of professional musicologists.