by Ann Hulbert
On his own, though, Matt loved repetition. “I used to play a lot of the same melodic lines in the right hand over and over to see how long I could do it,” he recalled at twenty-one. He obsessively worked through Jamey Aebersold’s play-along jazz CDs of famous tunes, and Diane kept him stocked with volume after volume. His parents also bought him jazz albums, and he “could just listen to them over and over,” too. Diane and Matt were busy on other fronts as well. He had begun messily writing out songs. (“Bouncy,” with odd time signatures, was how he described his favorite composing mode.) Diane scouted prospects for ensemble playing, since he was too young to do that at the conservatory.
The nearby Acton Jazz Café hosted laid-back jamming sessions on Sundays. She headed over and put Matt, now eight and still tiny, on the list to take his turn. His blue sneakers didn’t reach the pedals, and his head wasn’t visible above the piano. But after he had played Ellington and Gillespie standards, the applause was loud—and he liked it. Before long, Diane had lined up two café regulars to form the Matt Savage Trio: John Funkhouser, a bass player now on the Berklee College of Music faculty, and a drummer and music teacher named Steve Silverstein.
She had lucked into collaborators with the sensitivity and patience to engage a boy who “wouldn’t make eye contact…[and gave] the impression he was thinking of something else, that there were at least two streams going on at any time,” Funkhouser remembered. Matt needed stability that pick-up groups wouldn’t have given him. The paid gigs soon multiplied—thanks to an article about him in The Boston Globe after an early trio performance and then a 20/20 appearance, along with other media interest in autistic talent. Though Matt “wasn’t that far along” technically, Funkhouser said, his “prodigious…ability to keep the form” was there from the outset. Matt “would be playing and looking around the room, seeming to pay no attention to what he was doing on the piano,” or what his sidemen were up to—but the clueless style was deceptive. Matt, Funkhouser felt, had the improviser’s gift “right out of the gate.” He “was able to keep track of where he was, without fail,” never losing his place on the original melodic path as he soloed at the keyboard, “even when he was only nine years old.” (Funkhouser noted that he himself had mastered the skill only when he was a grad student, in his mid-twenties.) “I just understood jazz theory really intuitively” was how Matt put it later. “And I liked to do everything as fast as possible because slow is boring.”
Synchrony with people was another story. For his sidemen, the trick was to work at Matt’s tempo and tap into what engaged him. Funkhouser, who felt as much like an uncle as a mentor, recalled the breakthrough moment when Matt really tuned in to them. During a rehearsal, he had been “taking laps” (as they called his habit of restlessly circling the room), seeming barely to acknowledge Funkhouser’s suggestion for a new way to play a piece. Then, for the first time, Matt incorporated the change when he sat down at the piano—and was eager to stick with it. Matt remembered how unintuitive the collaborating felt. “Everything visual comes to me naturally, and also everything mathematical,” he reflected. “But just the interaction aspect of things is a whole other different world—especially in music, where everyone understands things through hearing and talking, which is a whole other thing for me, even though I love music so much.” Funkhouser and Silverstein left their bandleader to devise his own introductory patter with the audience, and Diane didn’t butt in either. Early on Matt rambled at the mike, often trailing off in a “Well, anyway…,” more cheerfully spacey than self-conscious. Gradually he found a sweetly stilted, humorous style that gave him obvious, and contagious, pleasure. The medium was the Savages’ persuasive message: Matt’s gigs, rather than being exploitative exposure, unlocked new ways to communicate.
So did his work with the legendary Charlie Banacos, which couldn’t have been better timed. Matt, now eleven, joined the ranks of students—an illustrious group—for whom the charismatic teacher’s individualized approach was transformative. Banacos, a pianist and composer himself, homed in on a musician’s distinctive neurological profile and tailored his training to that. “They really clicked,” Funkhouser said, noting that Matt “grew by leaps and bounds, way beyond me…especially in his reading ability, and his ear” during his six years with Banacos. Matt felt he was seriously focusing on his technique for the first time. And he credited Banacos with conveying “life lessons,” and lots of “silly jokes,” along with the arduous intricacies of jazz. Banacos didn’t just work with Matt on the piano and ear exercises that were his pedagogic specialty. They read and talked about Aesop’s fables, too.
By then, the Savages had moved to a farmhouse in southern New Hampshire, feeling that both of their children needed the flexibility of homeschooling. Outdoor freedom seemed a good idea, too. “We definitely did extreme things for our kids,” Larry said of their new life, growing produce and raising organic grass-fed beef and chickens. Matt sounded wistful in retrospect about moving away from peers (he had begun to make friends in the Sudbury elementary school) and sighed at the long commute to weekly lessons with Banacos (almost two hours each way). But he also confirmed his mother’s assessment: he didn’t feel isolated—a geography buff, he thrived on the trio’s busy touring, and he and his sister joined in local homeschooling activities. Not least, he loved the tranquility of farm life, happily playing with the barn cats when his parents shooed him away from the piano. Winter meant downhill skiing, which he could do midweek without crowds.
For Matt, the quiet proved productive. If his preteen tunes were predictably derivative, as Funkhouser observed they were (Matt, looking back, called them “clichéd”), “he evolved very quickly from everything being the same to exploring lots of different musical territory in a rudimentary but impressive way.” His technique continued to improve. He lucked into jams with jazz luminaries like McCoy Tyner and Bobby Watson. A piece in Time about Matt’s debut at the Blue Note in Manhattan in 2003 highlighted the growing sophistication of his peripatetic style, shifting “between softly gliding passages and furious fantasias with his arms whipping up and down the keyboard.” Matt’s output, not just his melodic verve, drew notice: five CDs, Larry’s handiwork, by the age of eleven. Impressed by the breezy brilliance at the piano, Time’s critic also recognized the struggle, quoting a youthfully buoyant Matt looking ahead: “ ‘Autism,’ he says, ‘is like a huge wall, and if you reach the top of it, you’re on your way.’ ”
Closer up, Funkhouser was struck by Matt’s remote affect in performance and a jaggedness in his musical approach. Was it the autism at work, he wondered—or maybe the influence of Matt’s hero Thelonious Monk? It was hard to tell. A year later, the title of Matt’s sixth album, Cutting Loose, suggested newly mature expressive horizons, though as the lead tune revealed, he was also still very much a numbers guy. “Infected with Hemiola,” Matt called the song. In the liner notes he explained that he was referring not to a disease but to “a musical term meaning that you play phrases from one time signature when you’re actually in another.”
What creative leaps might lie ahead? Matt had a tantalizing refrain at the ready when interviewers asked. “What I love about jazz,” he continued to say, now with years of intensive therapies and half a lifetime of lessons behind him, “is that you can break the rules and be free.” But the real liberation for Matt so far was that the adults in his life were focused on the more prosaic, yet no less prodigious, progress that had already happened. By twelve he had made “huge strides emotionally,” his parents and his sidemen agreed, and his music had been crucial.
A similar teach-the-talent approach kicked in with Jake, whose mother—like Matt’s, and Jay’s as well—found herself dealing every day with evidence of “a turbocharged working memory, advanced powers of visual-spatial cognition, and an extraordinary attention to physical detail.” Kristine ticked off classic autistic (and prodigy) traits in her inventory of Jake’s core capacities. (Given Jake’s musical aptitude and Matt’s math and pattern-reco
gnition acuity, you might almost wonder whether they could have swapped paths if the catalysts had been different.) “As long as Jake could get a good dose of serious astronomy,” Kristine reported, he was better able to handle social and emotional hurdles in mainstream kindergarten and beyond. But maintaining a balanced perspective, her memoir revealed, was no easy matter for parents.
On the one hand, Kristine prided herself on being a spirited, unspoiled woman from the heartland who had always loved kids (she now had a third son) and knew better than to burden childhood with worshipful expectations. “If I had stopped and let myself bask in the awe of Jake’s amazing abilities—if I had stopped to ponder how unusual he really is—I don’t think I could have been a good mother to him.” Jake wasn’t, she wrote, one of those systematically buffed kids “from a private school in Manhattan.” He was a boy whose needs prompted her to improvise. So she went ahead and asked if he could sit in on astronomy classes at nearby Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) after school some afternoons. He thrived in the courses, which didn’t make her a Pygmalion. She wasn’t one of those joylessly dutiful parents always “trying to ‘fix’ ” their children’s autism, either. Kristine emphasized that, through it all, she was a mom who never forgot about “play and ordinary childhood experiences.” She made sure their house became a video game hub in the neighborhood. (Jake was the resident ace.) Youth soccer and Little League mania might be out of reach, but Saturdays were for hacking around on fields with balls, not for science fairs or Math Olympiad study sessions.
On the other hand, Kristine could and did get carried away. It was that “over-the-top ‘muchness’ ” of hers at work (undiminished, despite the hardships of severe illness and a brutal recession experience, with Mike out of work and her day care nearly empty). But Jake was fortunate not to be the sole focus of the commotion that ensued. With her typical missionary zeal, and with more low-functioning students now enrolled as business picked up again, Kristine decided that families with autistic kids needed what she wanted for Jake: a place for weekend athletics, with no one keeping score and parents relaxing together on the sidelines. She threw herself into plans for a sports center, Jake’s Place—even as she also got caught up in ambitious new academic plans, and dreams, for Jake.
Thriving as a drop-in at IUPUI, Jake by ten hadn’t merely found his way to the savant website. He had made it onto the gifted-education-network radar. More to the point, his mother was soon on the experts’ wavelength. Kristine, who had begun her memoir as a champion of gut maternal instincts, now started to sound like a superachievement specialist. Soon she was armed with a heady new diagnosis—their son was “profoundly gifted”—and less attentive to her internal compass. Jake was invited to apply to an early-college program, and the pair went into overdrive, dragging an initially dubious Mike along. Jake aced a battery of tests and proceeded to binge on AP exams while Kristine enrolled him in Mensa, the high-IQ club. His interview for the accelerated program went badly (Jake got distracted, scrambling to pick up coins that fell out of his pocket), and he was judged too immature to manage more than three credit hours, which meant only one math class the first semester.
JACOB BARNETT Credit 15
The setback left him with lots of time and, in Kristine’s telling, proved the catalyst for a leap of maturity that couldn’t help but strain credulity. Jake didn’t merely dive into online coursework. Soon, as he pursued his own ideas, a “creative fugue state was his primary reality,” she wrote. Jake at eleven found himself, Kristine announced, in the throes of upending Einstein’s theory of relativity and, if his theory held, on the road to a Nobel Prize. She cited as her authority a Princeton astrophysicist whom she emailed, worried that Jake might be getting lost as he scribbled equations all over his whiteboards, as well as the windowpanes, late into the night. It was the counterpart to a Mozart moment, which the professor, Scott Tremaine, in fact aimed to gently undercut. Though Kristine failed to notice, he diplomatically did not stoke the miracle rhetoric in his emails back to her and to Jake. Instead he sent Jake a list of relevant books. His implicit message to Kristine was one she had earlier endorsed herself: fueling kids’ interests needn’t—shouldn’t, she had said—mean conveying inflated expectations. Jake had learned an impressive amount so far, Tremaine wrote her, noting that his theory involved “several of the toughest problems in astrophysics and theoretical physics. Anyone who solves these will be in line for a Nobel Prize.”
Like Jay and Matt, Jake was in for a brief blizzard of media exposure (60 Minutes couldn’t resist another superaccomplished boy). But by then he was happily enrolled in the Honors College at IUPUI, where the attentive dean was often called “Mama Jane” and did her best to help him, at thirteen, fit in with older students. And the savant perspective spared him the worst of the classic prodigy treatment. As Matt’s jazz life had, Jake’s story inspired optimism instead of the doom-tinged voyeurism that had sent young Norbert Wiener a century earlier into depression. Gone was the fraught vista of future disappointment. Whatever failures, or feats, might lie ahead, Jake’s precocious gifts had already helped rescue him from isolation. Ideally, they could pave the way for a maturity of richer social and emotional connections. Kristine, though she went overboard with the Einstein comparison, saw up close what counted most for her small man on campus, who was now a teenager. “The biggest change,” she noted, “is that Jake is finally capable of real conversation.”
· 6 ·
With the arrival of adolescence and shadows on their upper lips, none of the boys was exactly a chatterbox. But all three were ready to talk back, in different ways. Jay (who had a habit of quietly humming musical phrases during pauses in conversation) needed his own chance to dispel the Mozart effect—the glow not just of effortless, but also of crowd-drawing, musical genius. By 2006, when he graduated from high school in New Haven at fourteen, the tricky business of shielding him while also promoting him had been in the hands of ICM Artists for several years. His agent there was trying to make the most, but not too much, of ripe early moments for a young composer before he had to face the “hazardous transition to maturity,” in the words of The New Yorker’s music critic Alex Ross, who knew what lay ahead for even the most remarkable talents in a marginalized classical music world: “the disappointing realization that modern American culture has no space for a composer hero.”
The rarity of his experience was now dawning on Jay. Prime chances to hear his work played live—invaluable, and infrequent, for an orchestral composer—kept turning up and were hard to turn down. His recording debut was on a major label (“a validation” that, as a profile of Jay in The New York Times noted, “a classical composer may never live to see”). In 2006 Sony Classical released a CD of two of Jay’s pieces: his Fifth Symphony, played by the London Symphony Orchestra, and his Quintet for Strings, performed by the Juilliard String Quartet and the cellist Darrett Adkins. The Times review, itself another unusual validation, highlighted “verve in the rhythms and invention in the harmonies; the tunes catch the ear. Movement by movement and start to finish, the architecture has a sturdy logic that does not preclude surprise.” A year later Jay sat in the front row at Carnegie Hall for the world premiere of his Violin Concerto, commissioned for and played by the virtuoso, and former prodigy, Joshua Bell.
Visibly ill at ease as he faced the audience to take his bow, Jay resisted the role of ingratiating wunderkind offstage, too. He wanted to counter the “divine inspiration” aura encouraged by his 60 Minutes appearance three years earlier, when he had spoken of whole pieces arriving in his head. He tended to hear themes, he explained, but the links among them became clear only later; “at the age of 12,” he drily noted, “I was not exactly the most articulate of individuals around.” Which was not to say that now, at the age of fifteen, he showed much interest in becoming more communicative. “I really don’t spend much time interacting with other people,” Jay told a questioner eager to know what his peers made of his musical w
ork. And asked about what he was trying to convey in the concerto, he resorted again to sardonic-laconic mode: “I don’t know. I never figured that out.” But Jay felt he had figured out one thing: that a postponement of publicity “for about 10 years” might have served him well. “I’d have to start out getting pieces played at schools and universities and benefits and the like—like normal composers,” he said. “And then eventually when my talents are better formed have all the commissions and interviewers coming in.”
Jay—who had supplemented high school with Latin, philosophy, and music composition classes at Yale—proceeded to spend a couple of gap years pursuing music as well as other interests (writing, tae kwan do, and photography among them). By the time he headed off in 2009 to study music at Peterhouse College at Cambridge University, the lack of self-critical distance on his musical creations that had worried Samuel Adler certainly was no longer a problem, if it had ever been one. Jay sounded coolly underwhelmed by his past work, not least his Fifth Symphony. And he was clear-eyed as he described a future goal, “to reach the point where I’m using sounds in such a way that there’s no other way it could’ve been composed, but at the same time it’s not predicable or boring.” It might elude him for more than a decade or, he added, perhaps a lifetime.