A heavyweight boxer, extremely tidy, ignoring normal scales (9)
I believe the answer is:
atonality
'ignoring normal scales' is the definition.
(ignoring tonal scales in music)
'a heavyweight boxer extremely tidy' is the wordplay.
'heavyweight' becomes 'ton' (a ton weighs a lot).
'boxer' becomes 'ali' (Muhammad Ali).
'extremely' means to remove the middle letters (only the extremes of the word are used).
'tidy' with its middle taken out is 'ty'.
'a'+'ton'+'ali'+'ty'='ATONALITY'
(Another definition for atonality that I've seen is " Absence of key or mode".)
I've seen this clue in The Guardian.
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