by Ann Hulbert
When he was six, math-minded Matt stumbled on his power to make very gratifying sense of a new realm of patterns—thanks to more active help from his mother than she generally took credit for. (Diane was wary of a stage-parent stigma.) A second round of Auditory Integration Training that year did more than make sounds bearable for Matt. Diane and Larry, upstairs in their Sudbury house, were stunned to hear him downstairs playing “London Bridge” and other tunes on a rainbow-keyed Little Tykes xylophone piano that came with color-coded music. This was the same boy who had gotten upset whenever Diane, trained on the piano as a child, tried to play. (The exception was when he asked for “Peanuts,” by which he meant the TV show theme song, or “fast,” which meant the third movement of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.) Now she showed him middle C on their big piano, pointed out how the Little Tyke music sheets matched up with the keys, and explained the way octaves worked. For Matt, whose fascination with numbers and ratios had lately spawned an obsession with roller coasters (he loved reciting their speeds and other specs), it all made sense. He quickly figured out the piano’s eighty-eight-note language of sound.
MATT SAVAGE Credit 13
Matt later said he was pretty sure he had skipped around in the beginner piano books that Diane promptly pulled out of the closet, where she had been saving them for the day when her children were ready for lessons. She and Larry described him racing straight through them all. Diane once again hurried to the phone. A local piano teacher who came highly recommended (and who, Diane said wryly, sighed when she heard yet another parent touting a gifted child) agreed to meet Matt. His perfect pitch, sight-reading skill, ability to play back what he heard, and astonishing memory—plus his restless energy—left her in no doubt: here was a “special situation,” in Diane’s words.
As Matt careened between piano and couch, knocking over plants en route, he made remarkable—if unruly—progress in their weekly lessons. When he chafed at being told to play the notes on the page, rather than the ones he thought sounded best, his no-nonsense teacher was firm. Classical pianists, she said, stick with scores. Jazz pianists, his ever responsive mother mentioned, get to improvise. Though Diane and Larry knew little besides that about jazz, Matt remembered they at some point played Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue for him, and it made a big impression—for a quirky reason: with numbers always very much on the brain, he recalled happily noting several tracks in the nine-minute range (three out of five, as it happens).
An event that made a big impression on his parents happened a year later, one lovely summer day at a crafts fair in Maine when he was seven. As Diane liked to tell the story, the family strolled past a jazz band warming up in a tent, and Matt yanked free of her grasp. He climbed onto the piano bench, asking to play, and when the surprised sax player proposed a blues tune in the key of B-flat, Matt proceeded to chime right in. In truth, as Diane had “to admit sheepishly,” she was the one who had asked whether the band could play a song with Matt. He would never have reached out that way, and she was just hoping to fend off a tantrum as she tried to extricate him from the tent. But she wasn’t embellishing, she stressed, in saying he had never played anything like that before. The sax player ran after them, urging jazz lessons for Matt. Diane, as usual, got right on the phone. This time she called the precollege program at the New England Conservatory. At the audition, held two weeks later, Diane said Matt astonished the faculty.
Faced with a truly boxed-in boy, Kristine emphasized that she was no mere behind-the-scenes facilitator in the unfolding of Jake’s powers. She was a “fighter,” ready to do battle against a blinkered educational system prone to underestimate children’s potential. If a boastful tone crept in, and it did, Kristine’s immodest confidence (“I came to see my maternal intuition as a compass pointing true north”) and her crusading gumption (“the over-the-top ‘muchness’ of my schemes was a big part of the way I worked”) also drove her crucial decision. She pulled Jake out of state-funded developmental preschool, convinced he was shutting down out of boredom. The boy who clutched his alphabet flash cards (which his teachers told Kristine not to let him bring to school) wanted to learn, her intuition told her. Why should he be destined for stagnation in special education? Never mind grand expectations, her hope was to help pave his way into mainstream kindergarten.
At home, she now carved out time for activities Jake loved and was great at (like puzzles), not just for practice in what he couldn’t do (like sit still next to another child)—and at three he began talking again. That didn’t mean conversing. Still, Kristine was listening closely to his litanies and realized he wasn’t just reciting numbers but adding them, as well as reading and remembering everything. And she saw that Jake, once fixated on his flash cards, now constantly dragged around a college astronomy textbook she had bought at the local Barnes & Noble when she had found him sitting on the floor glued to it. But Kristine couldn’t forget about those social skills if he was going to have a shot at kindergarten. So she reached out to other families by email, hoping to add a few other children with autism to the mix. Her goal was a group experience that would suit Jake better than just mingling with her day care crowd seemed to.
When she heard back from one exhausted parent after another, all conveying that she was their “port of last resort,” Kristine scaled up her scheme. She founded a charity. Twice a week in the evening, after vacuuming the day care space, she ran “a highly unorthodox kindergarten boot camp.” Similarly fervent parents followed her lead in welcoming, rather than squelching, a common symptom in their autistic children: intense and persistent interests. Whether those preoccupations did, or didn’t, “match up with some so-called normal template for child development” wasn’t important. With Jake’s beloved astronomy textbook and their summer stargazing in mind, Kristine arranged an outing for him to see Mars through a telescope at the planetarium on the campus of nearby Butler University, which was holding a special program.
Jake couldn’t wait, though on learning that their tickets included a lecture and slides, Kristine had second thoughts—not that he was disruptive or prone to tantrums. But Jake insisted, and rather than squirming, he piped up when nobody else responded to the professor’s question about why Mars’s moons were elliptical in shape. What size were the moons? Jake asked. Told they were small, he suggested that gravity doesn’t exert enough force on them to pull them into spheres. In Kristine’s account, “the room went silent,” and she was overwhelmed. On the drive home, he couldn’t stop talking about the solar system. What struck her as much as her own wonder at the revelation of Jake’s passion was “the awe and veneration” shown by others in the audience. They “had been inspired, transported to a better place, and they’d been delivered there by Jake.”
Kristine’s tone conveyed a humility all too rare in hovering parents, who so often presume that young minds are simply there to be steered. Jake “hadn’t been missing after all,” she realized, just because he was unreachable. Unhindered, he had been busy working: his repetitive behavior, much as some autism researchers speculated, reflected detail-oriented curiosity rather than being merely a self-soothing habit. “Rage to master” was a relevant phrase coined by another psychologist, Ellen Winner, who concluded that a fiercely self-propelled drive was what set a true prodigy apart from a superindustrious high-achiever. “Nobody was telling Jake how to learn,” Kristine wrote, “because nobody thought he could. In that way, autism had given Jake a bizarre gift.” At the same time, Kristine’s reverential version of events had the too-good-to-be-true gloss that the original “miracle worker,” more than a century earlier, had noted could be more uplifting than useful. It “rubs me the wrong way” was Annie Sullivan’s response to an “extravagant” early report that heralded selfless labors (hers) and phenomenal feats (Helen’s). “The simple facts,” Sullivan went on, “would be so much more convincing!” Yet the facts of these one-of-a-kind cases could also be confusing. As Jay, Matt, and Jake now surged ahead, they confounded mentors, along with pa
rents, at just about every turn.
· 4 ·
“What would you do if you personally met an eight-year-old boy who can compose and fully notate half a movement of a magnificent piano sonata in the style of Beethoven, before your very eyes and without a piano, in less than an hour?” Bowled over, Samuel Zyman posed that question about Jay. He agreed with the Greenbergs that the “best academic, musical, and social environment for him to develop to his fullest potential” wasn’t obvious. Send him to Juilliard, Zyman concluded—not that even an incubator of musical talent like his conservatory offered a Jay-appropriate track. But Jay was off in his own remarkable orbit in any case: that was Zyman’s message, which he spread not just at Juilliard, where Jay enrolled as a scholarship student in the precollegiate division at ten, but also on 60 Minutes two years later.
The outward contours of Jay’s musical trajectory certainly had been unorthodox so far. He had started cello lessons at three. He then tackled the piano on his own, though filling those notebooks with music, not practicing an instrument, was his priority. By seven, he was learning all about theory and composition—and forging a real bond—with a music graduate student in North Carolina. Steadily composing, Jay took violin lessons in Macedonia, where he lived with his family the year he turned ten in December. But Zyman’s emphasis, amplified by 60 Minutes, was on Jay’s inward creative pathway. He compared Jay to “the likes of Mozart, and Mendelssohn, and Saint-Saëns” in his brilliant compositional fluency at such an early age. Jay’s feats of rapid auditory and visual conceptualization and memory, Zyman said later, outstripped anything he had encountered in other young composers busy writing similarly sophisticated music. Watching Jay enter the bassoon part of a piece into the computer, measure after measure, without even a glance at what the rest of the orchestra was doing, had stunned him. “It’s hard to convey what that means,” Zyman said. “Who can do that?”
At the behest of 60 Minutes, a pale and serious Jay did his best to elaborate on the theme of spontaneous creation. “It’s as if the unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light,” he said. “I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written, when it isn’t.” The camera caught him sounding neurologically informed. “Multiple channels is what it’s been termed,” Jay went on, explaining that his “brain is able to control two or three different musics at the same time—along with the channel of everyday life.” The camera also caught him looking socially ill at ease. That ordinary-life channel didn’t seem to be coming in so loud and clear, as indeed how could it for a child so absorbed in solitary pursuit of those musics? An awkward game of catch with another boy—a bit of B-roll footage—showed Jay in need of guidance on where to put his thumb in the baseball mitt. By contrast, adjustments were rarely called for in the pursuit that truly counted for him. “No, I don’t really ever do that,” Jay said when asked about revising a piece of music. “It just usually comes right the first time.”
JAY GREENBERG Credit 14
But the remarkable musical fluency that helped pave Jay’s way into New York’s elite musical precincts didn’t guarantee a seamless experience once he got there. “I was an unwelcome arrival at Juilliard’s doorstep in 2002” was Jay’s wry version of events in retrospect. Zyman’s savant-like billing of him and the ensuing media coverage raised eyebrows. So did Jay’s bridling at the mandatory ear-training classes, which the school considered necessary discipline even for an adept like him. Where Zyman had hoped that “being surrounded by other super musically gifted kids would help him,” Jay’s reticence came across as arrogance. (Zyman knew otherwise: his son briefly went to the same Upper West Side magnet public school as Jay did, and they connected over other intellectual interests.) And though Jay grasped musical theory as if he were wired for it, Zyman marveled, examining his own work was a different story, as another leading faculty member discovered in working with him.
“We had real problems at the beginning,” remembered Samuel Adler, a revered composition teacher and an eminent composer. (He was a former child prodigy himself, born in 1928 in a hospital in Mannheim, Germany, adorned with a plaque noting that Mozart had once lived in a house on that spot.) Jay was hesitant even to show his pieces, and then “everything I said…he said ‘no, that’s how I heard it.’ ” Adler didn’t dispute that music came “pouring out” of Jay, or that what he could hear in his head, and then put down, was highly unusual. It was an augury well worth attending to: “A person who can do that and grows into that can be an excellent composer.” But such eruptions were generally, he noted, a gift of immaturity: as a young musician, “you think you can do the whole thing…because you’re not discriminating.” It’s easy to believe “every note is sacrosanct.” Yet the key to fertile invention, Adler emphasized, was a dogged refusal to be satisfied, a constant self-questioning—hardly encouraged by “this business of having somebody say to you, oh, you’re the next Mozart.”
Adler had experienced firsthand the stern school of deflation. His father, a composer, had ruthlessly curbed his fledgling work (as, of course, Mozart’s father had not: Leopold had his son churning out pieces). And Adler felt deeply in debt to the “terrifying teachers” he had found in Aaron Copland and Paul Hindemith, who goaded him to self-criticism. “Let it gush out for a while” was Adler’s more permissive philosophy, “but also know that it’s been done.” With Jay, he concluded there wasn’t going to be a “breakthrough critiquing his own music.” So during two and a half years of weekly lessons, they worked together on technique instead. Adler was relieved to see Jay throw himself into exercises in different styles: “He was truly terrific and this gave me great hope that he had it in him to grow.” Not that the way ahead—as Adler had seen from decades of work with students whose childhoods had been prodigiously focused on musical mastery—was smooth. “I think all these very talented people have some kind of problem in communicating, which I don’t think is a bad thing, by the way,” he reflected. “It’s just that they are not quite in this world.”
Nor was Adler, Jay might have told him, quite in his world. Adler evidently never guessed that what he called gushing, Jay experienced as a “spurt of productivity and growth,” as he wrote later in notes on some of the pieces from this period. However uncomfortable and uncommunicative Jay may have been at Juilliard, his three years there were full of ferment for him as a composer, starting in late 2002 with his 9/11 Overture. Whatever sound bites a reclusive boy gave television interviewers, Jay relied on more than bolts from the blue. His avid listening, and Adler’s tutelage, lay behind a burst of work that included a viola concerto, a quintet for strings, and a sonata for cello and piano. And Jay did know how to critique, or at any rate ruthlessly reject, his own musical creations. On the way to finishing that sonata in 2004—his first work involving a cello soloist—Jay had thrown away several “unfruitful attempts over the years.” The boy whose first written notes had looked like little cellos was determined to write a “particularly remarkable” piece for the instrument. It wasn’t until he was almost thirteen that he was finally satisfied.
· 5 ·
“Genius is an abnormality, and can signal other abnormalities” was the blunter verdict of Samuel Adler’s Juilliard colleague Veda Kaplinsky, a renowned piano teacher and for years the head of a precollegiate division full of off-the-charts students. Speaking with Andrew Solomon about prodigies for his book Far from the Tree, she went on in the clinical vein that Lewis Terman had hoped to banish but that Matt and Jake’s parents knew well: “Many gifted kids have A.D.D. or O.C.D. or Asperger’s. When the parents are confronted with two sides of a kid, they’re so quick to acknowledge the positive, the talented, the exceptional; they are often in denial over everything else.” What Kaplinsky didn’t say, but Matt and Jake discovered as they forged ahead, was that the reverse situation—autism undeniably in the foreground, outsize abilities a surprise—could be a lucky break of sorts, strange and unlikely though that may sound.
“Teach
the talent” was the Savages’ and the Barnetts’ refrain as they pushed back against the deficit-focused regimen prescribed for children with autism. Darold Treffert’s surmise that “Matt comes with software installed—the musical chip” might suggest that a mere flick of the switch was all it would take. But Matt, prone to tuning out the world and throwing tantrums of frustration, offered daily reminders that talents are part of complicated emotional and cognitive packages. Even a mother who shared his perfect pitch and knack for playing pieces by ear, as Diane did, had to face that there was plenty in Matt that she couldn’t fathom or aspire to fine-tune. (Children afflicted with mind-blindness can help make adults humbler about their own insights into others’ heads.) If anything, the little she and Larry knew about jazz might have given them pause: here was a form of music rooted in improvisational collaboration. For a boy like Matt, as impervious to social signals as he was alert to rule-based patterns, jazz hardly seemed an obvious match. Yet that was also precisely its allure. The aim above all was to keep him from spinning off into his own fixed and lonely track.
At the New England Conservatory, the Israeli-born pianist Eyran Katsenelenbogen found lessons with Matt exciting and exhausting. The effortless brilliance of his new student (who focused better if he sat on his teacher’s lap) wasn’t what stood out most. Katsenelenbogen was struck more by the stark imbalance in Matt’s abilities, “some…that are very far ahead and some that are very far behind,” and in his proclivities as well—true for all of us, but extreme in Matt’s case. He could hear chords and do big calculations in his head yet wouldn’t go to the bathroom alone for fear of the flushing noise. At the piano, Matt’s right hand was light-years ahead of his left. He surged through pieces, Katsenelenbogen recalled, “like a scanner, moving quickly and getting a lot of information.” Introduce him to bebop style, and “he went home and in two weeks he came back with knowledge that would have taken someone else years” to pick up—not because he followed a herculean practice routine. Yet ask Matt to rework a passage, and he was devastated. “That sentence was horrible to him,” Katsenelenbogen said. “That translated to him as ‘You’re no good.’ ”