The goddess of music smiles on those who honor her. American Contemporary Ballet, directed by the choreographer Lincoln Jones, usually performs in downtown Los Angeles. But Jones chose a larger venue seven miles to the west for the premiere in June of his new ballet The Euterpides (named after Euterpe, the goddess of music).

A week after The Euterpides opened, rioting engulfed downtown Los Angeles, triggered by escalating federal arrests of illegal aliens. Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass imposed a curfew that blocked access to the area after 8 p.m.. Even had the audience for The Euterpides been willing, for the sake of art, to risk being hit with a Molotov cocktail or having their cars set on fire, the curfew would have been the coup de grâce for any lingering attendance. Jones’s new venue in the Fairfax District was far enough away from the violence that The Euterpides didn’t lose its ticket holders. Other less-mobile downtown arts organizations were not so lucky.

The contrast between the new ballet and the anarchy that it had escaped could not have been more striking — on the one hand, grace and delicacy, on the other, savagery and chaos. A cancellation of The Euterpides’s run would have been especially unfortunate, since it was a double premiere. Not only were its story and choreography new, but it also constituted the composer Alma Deutscher’s first ballet score.

Deutscher is the precocious British musician whose debut opera, Cinderella, enjoyed a sold-out run at Opera San José in California in 2017, when Deutscher was 12, and who soloed at the age of 14 in her piano and violin concerti at Carnegie Hall in 2019.

Violin and piano prodigies are legion today, thanks to Asian parents’ charming atavistic belief that the mastery of a classical instrument (or, ideally, two) provides an on-ramp into the American upper class. Composing prodigies are rarer, and the rarest of all is a composer, of any age, who prominently rejects the academic dogmas of modern classical composition. Atonalism, serialism, the substitution of random sound for organized harmony and melody — all have sent the classical tradition into a tailspin and have driven all but the most dedicated audiences out of concert halls.

Since Deutscher began writing music, she has proclaimed her fealty to beauty and her puzzlement as to why a composer would deliberately inflict more ugliness on an already ugly world. Such candor has earned Deutscher a condescending cold shoulder from much of the classical-music press but an enthusiastic following among audiences for her still relatively rare public appearances. Now, age 20, she has reached that liminal stage of development that challenges all erstwhile prodigies, though she has retained the disarming sweetness, preternatural poise, and enthusiasm of her younger self.

In 2018, Deutscher’s family moved from Cambridge, England to Vienna, Austria to further her musical training. She chose to study conducting, on the plausible assumption that compositional studies, even in the home of Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Johann Strauss II, Mahler, and Anton Bruckner, would favor the unfortunate sequelae of Arnold Schoenberg’s Second Viennese School. She also became swept up in Vienna’s ballroom-dancing culture, and it shows. Deutscher’s music already had a waltz-like fluidity, which The Euterpides only makes more prominent. But the score also accentuates a related aspect of her musical language: its affinity with the great popular-music traditions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Euterpides sounds less like Swan Lake or Coppélia and more like the backdrop for a spangled Fred Astaire—Ginger Rogers duet on a luxury ocean-liner. Its roots are in salon music, operetta, Stephen Foster, Jerome Kern, and the American songbook. Its instrumentation — for a small string orchestra (i.e., no winds or brass) and piano — contributes to that salon sound.

The choreographer Jones conceived the story: the goddess of music has five daughters, called the Euterpides, each of whom embodies a particular element of music. Euterpe sends her daughters to dance with a favored mortal; he falls particularly in love with one but carries the gifts of all five into the world. “When we listen to music,” Jones suggests, “we hear the Euterpides at play.”

Jones came up with fourteen possible aspects of music that the Euterpides could represent and asked Deutscher to choose five. She eschewed obvious candidates like harmony or crescendo in favor of more esoteric ideas such as anesis, a term from classical rhetoric here applied to mean a release from a musical climax, and hemiola, a shifting of perceived meter from three beats per measure to two, or vice versa.

Deutscher proposed to structure the ballet as a theme and variations. The theme-and-variations form is one of the most fertile in the classical-music tradition, allowing composers to display virtuosic musical imagination. Some of its most profound examples for piano are Haydn’s Andante con variazioni in F minor (Hob. XVII:6) and Brahms’s Variations on an Original Theme (Opus 21, Number 1). Here the genre is more playful. After a traditional musical-theater introduction that seems to say, “The show is beginning, folks, buckle up!” the theme arrives, lilting and almost cloyingly sentimental in its harmonic progressions. A sassy B section breaks in unexpectedly, its quicksilver textures recalling Mendelssohn’s Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Each of the five daughters then has a solo dance to a variation inspired by her particular musical identity.

Pneume, for breath, is the most compelling — suave and gossamer, re-creating the moment when a listener cannot breathe under the sheer weight of musical beauty. It is no surprise that the son-in-law-in-waiting will choose Pneume for his truest love. Stacte, for staccato (a percussive musical attack), is a close runner-up. The piano, as the percussion instrument of the ensemble, dominates the Stacte variation. After an introduction that recalls a Chopin polonaise or his “Revolutionary Étude,” the piano line becomes frisky and mischievous, while the strings mimic a gypsy or tango orchestra. The variation could also have been named Syncopation, after its infectious rhythms.

Once the male soloist arrives onstage to dance with the Euterpides, new melodies pour from the score, blending with the original theme in ingenious ways. Deutscher’s instrumental melodies could more aptly be called “Songs Without Words” than Mendelssohn’s solo piano pieces of that name. The latter are not, in fact, particularly songlike, whereas Deutscher’s melodies — compact and symmetrically structured — call out to be sung. One could imagine a lyricist, maybe Deutscher herself, doing for The Euterpides and other works what Kismet did for Alexander Borodin’s music.

The Euterpides was followed by the overture to Deutscher’s opera Cinderella. The main theme from The Euterpides echoes a motif from that overture — swaying, sighing, and inflected by a fleeting accidental. This bittersweet motif, which itself recalls Dvořák’s Prague Waltzes, is characteristic of Deutscher’s musical sensibilities.

After the intermission, acb performed George Balanchine’s Serenade, set to Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings. Deutscher, in a miniskirt and silver sequined waistband, her hair swept back in a chignon like a dancer’s, conducted the entire program on opening night. Her conducting technique is precise and economical, with clear signals for changes of tempo and instrumental voicing. The orchestra had intermittent pitch problems, beyond her control. The pianist, Brendan White, who played short pieces by Chopin, Brahms, and Gershwin before the performance and during the intermission, was superb.

It is unfair to compare works of vastly different intention and scope, and ones that come from different stages of a composer’s career. Yet when works are placed side by side, comparison is almost unavoidable. Tchaikovsky’s Serenade for Strings was not composed for dance and thus not subject to certain formal limitations. Nevertheless, it was a reminder of a musical universe that Deutscher has not yet entered. Whether she chooses to do so remains to be seen. Her instincts may be more theatrical.

Lincoln Jones and Deutscher were a natural pairing. Jones reveres Fred Astaire for embodying the music he is dancing to. Deutscher has consumed the Astaire canon. Another ground for Astaire reverence is the master’s instinct to extend a gesture a little bit farther than merely gifted dancers (including all of his partners) would, and to put into that gesture more concentrated style.

Jones, too, is a dissident, perhaps at even greater professional cost. Even before the George Floyd racial hysteria, he had rejected the diversity pledges that charitable funders were demanding from him. Ballet was not in the business of furthering someone’s conception of “social justice,” he thought; he would not compromise his aesthetic standards by making race part of his hiring criteria, as some donors insisted.

Then came the real firestorm. Jones did not post on his company’s Instagram page the black square that signified, in the Floyd race-riot era, solidarity with the fight against alleged white supremacy. He had no right, he believed, to take a political stance on behalf of his dancers. He became a social-media pariah, even as fellow choreographers and dancers whispered to him their secret agreement. Since then he has entered the fray on behalf of free speech and the integrity of high art, as he did in the November 2023 issue of The New Criterion with a piece titled “What Ballet Is.”

George Balanchine is Jones’s other inspiration; American Contemporary Ballet exists in part to preserve and spread Balanchine’s corpus on the West Coast. Like Balanchine’s dances, Jones’s choreography for The Euterpides uses nineteenth-century ballet vocabulary, displaying Balanchine’s clarity, proportion, and feel for symmetry and space. The choreography for the five variations was less differentiated than the music, almost necessarily so given the constraints of the classical-dance idiom. There were differences in the use of petits jetés, arabesques, relevés, and développés, no doubt, but to an average viewer, these differences were too subtle to register. Nevertheless the dancing was excellent, though the troupe’s males (who performed in Serenade as well) were not at the same level of polish as their female partners. This skills gap plagues most classical ballet in the United States, though probably not in Russia.

The Euterpides’s ballerinas wore short ice-pink tutus, supple enough to float gently around their thighs and torsos. They emerged from darkness onto a bare stage where a few spotlights played. That darkness never lifted before, after, and during the program, an effect Jones favors for creating a sense of being in a world apart but which leaves the phototropic yearning for light.

One didn’t need the cover of an artificial night to appreciate the fact that one was in a world apart. The fiery hatred and destruction that engulfed acb’s traditional home during The Euterpides’s run threaten Western civilization on every side. Artists like Deutscher and Jones are the most effective defenders of that civilization, on whose efforts the future of human-created beauty hangs.

Heather Mac Donald is the Thomas W. Smith Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of When Race Trumps Merit and other books. A version of this column originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of The New Criterion.