The secret of Mozart’s genius unlocked – has a teenager succeeded where generations of musicologists have failed?

US student Linus Chen-Plotkin has analysed music by four canonical composers looking for patterns. Turns out Mozart’s music moves in the least predictable way It’s a question that has taxed musical thinkers for centuries: just what is it about one composer’s music that makes it more distinctive than anyone else’s?

Entire disciplines of academic thought, of music analysis and historical musicology, as well as the formation of classical music’s canon of “great” composers, have been given over to this single idea: can it be proved that Mozart, say, was measurably “better” than other composers? Our instinctive feeling about the sensual magic of Mozart’s music is part…