Off the Charts

by Ann Hulbert

  Yet that lack of interaction, Jay’s mode up to his midteens, now seemed to bother him in ways that it hadn’t before. Earlier, his aloofness had served almost as a shield. Being cut off from “emo-listening, hip-hop-dancing, ironically ‘American Idol’-analyzing classmates,” as Alex Ross had put the plight of young classical composers, had so far spared Jay the kind of musical pressures that young Mozart faced. And early on, he had seemed almost impervious to the publicity he got, which could have been far more intrusive. (Ross in particular had been studiously circumspect in noting the promise of such a young composer.) Abetted by protective enablers, from his parents to Samuel Adler, and by an iPod stocked with musical heroes, Jay had made the most of creative isolation and concentration—states all too rare in our clamorous e-world and deeply congenial to a people-avoidant boy.

  Now, though, Jay felt a need to reach out, not that he’d had much practice. He started a Facebook page devoted to an irregular series of “notes,” mostly about music, where in sardonic-plaintive style he expressed a desire for contact. “Thus, no longer can I remain entirely aloof from my listeners (I’m sure there are some…probably…).” Or from living musicians, whose work on the “cutting or the bleeding edge of music as I know it” he was eager to track down. Or from popular music, which he was interested to try incorporating into his pieces. Or from performing artists, if the ruthlessly winnowed selection of his work that he now considered “worthy” was ever to get heard, not least by him on more than his computer. “So, although I’m aware very few people actually read this blog, I’d like some recordings. Please?”

  At the same time, Jay began to do what even—or perhaps especially—a former prodigy has every right to do, however all-powerful and fruitful his childhood passion has seemed. He wavered and wondered about trying another path. Was he studying music, he asked in one of his Facebook notes, just because he could do it well and with ease? Should he really be listening to his “inner scientist”? Jay didn’t change course at Cambridge or stop composing. As he had in New York, he took long walks “conducting in my head,” and he wondered what the locals made of him: “I imagine they just think I’m drunk.” But not long after his return to the United States, he left again and went even farther away. His father was appointed a dean at the University of Auckland, and Jay—who had stopped writing his Facebook notes and hadn’t been responding to his agent’s calls about occasional commissions—followed along with the family. Like many another driven superchild turned twentysomething, perhaps he was still trying to decide what he wanted to do. Nobody else, his disappearing act suggested, should presume to predict where he might end up.

  Matt and Jake—who as autistic outsiders had been practicing social interaction for years—pushed back in another spirit. They forged ahead on prestigious inside tracks. (So had Helen Keller, determined “to go to Radcliffe, and receive a degree, as many other girls have done.”) Matt, who had completed high school work a year early and had been collecting ASCAP Young Jazz Composer awards along the way, enrolled at the Berklee College of Music in Boston in the fall of 2009. The only accommodation Diane sought there was a well-located dorm room. She wanted to make sure he could decompress between classes. Drilled by his mother in social and laundry strategies during his gap year, Matt threw himself into navigating more than musical challenges when he arrived.

  He picked up on every cue he could—how not to dress (shorts and a T-shirt), how not to interpret his classmates’ cool lingo (literally), how not to view professors who showed up late and ill prepared (too impatiently). Meanwhile, Matt was circumspect about signaling his autism. Downplaying it as “almost a gimmick” that had garnered attention for his youthful talents, he also quietly acknowledged that “communicating with friends” was still an issue. He helped a Boston Conservatory committee that was planning music programs for children on the autism spectrum, and he toured for autism benefits, but at club gigs the topic rarely came up.

  In 2011, on the release of his ninth album, Welcome Home, Matt performed at Dizzy’s Club Coca-Cola, Jazz at Lincoln Center with the renowned alto saxophonist Bobby Watson. The only hint of unworldly savantism was Matt’s way of gazing around the room as he played. Then again, Watson wandered around between solos, so for anybody who didn’t know Matt’s diagnosis, here were two quirky jazzmen at work. Still slight at not quite nineteen, Matt addressed the audience with a faintly awkward smile and intonation that made him seem very young. His theme, though, was experience. Dressed in a dapper black button-down shirt over black pants, he talked about his recent years on the go—shuttling among New York, Boston, and New Hampshire—and about figuring out where he might be headed. “That’s a tune all about the decisions—how it’s tough sometimes,” he riffed about “Inner Search,” ending with the positive take he had learned from Charlie Banacos. “But out of those times can come great music.” Matt’s brilliant technique was on display, and he shaped the set to culminate with his most ambitious piece yet. In the five-part Big Apple Suite, he made impressive use of his signature bounce, along with inventive chord work, striking melodies, and newly reflective moods.

  After graduating from Berklee in 2013, Matt braved the Big Apple full-time to get his masters in performance at the Manhattan School of Music (MSM). The degree included a good dose of composition, too, and on a Sunday in May 2014, as his first year ended (final exams started the next day), he excitedly prepared for a concert at Small’s Jazz Club in the Village. It was Mother’s Day, but Diane wasn’t there in the cavelike venue. For Matt, the real occasion was his twenty-second birthday and the chance to play new work with a couple of classmates as sidemen and other MSM friends in the audience. Matt pivoted virtuosically from keyboard to piano and back, joking that he might slip some Justin Bieber into his long medley Epic Standards. And he went on to bridge pop and classical worlds with his latest pieces.

  From “Go On,” a trio that built on a four-chord vamp inspired by pop tunes, Matt turned to “Rebuilding,” another trio, this one written for an assignment in a very challenging class devoted to jazz styles and analysis. Based on a Bartók theme, it was Matt’s venture away from “straight-ahead jazz,” as he put it, incorporating twentieth-century classical music and the complex methods his teacher had introduced. “It’s a journey from chaos to order,” Matt explained the following year, when he also featured it at his master’s recital, again in a pairing with “Go On.” This time his parents were in the audience. So was the head of the McCarton School for children on the autism spectrum, where Matt had been teaching music several times a week to students whose blend of distractibility and intense focus he knew well. “It’s all about attention span” was his hard-earned pedagogical insight.

  As for what lay ahead, perhaps a quick look back at William Sidis is in order. A century earlier he had graduated from Harvard, having endured ordeals that a prodigious savant label would surely now spare anyone even remotely like him. He announced his intent to live “in seclusion”—and stuck to it. Matt headed to Boston after graduation, ready to take a break from New York City, which could feel “chaotic,” he said. An orderly journey was not exactly in view—when is it for a young artist? But retreat was the last thing on his mind. At twenty-three, he returned to old haunts to play gigs and compose, while holding down a half-time job teaching music to students on the spectrum. Soon he had started a funk band, and was working on a new solo recording. Neither Matt nor his parents expected that he should by now have “arrived.” While his father admitted to worrying that Matt never seemed to slow down and relax, Diane saw the flip side. “He’s been developing all this time, not just until he was ten and eleven,” she said. “He’s making gains….I hear it every time he calls.”

  Jake was almost fourteen—an eager college student who had lately also become part of a physics research group at Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis—when he had an onstage moment to share some thoughts about his path so far. In 2012 he took a very twenty-first-century-style developme
ntal step: he gave a TEDxTeen talk. By now he had dropped his backward-baseball-cap look in favor of shaggier hair. Pacing in front of the PowerPoint screen in his flip-flops, he did his best to be, as the genre demanded, heartfelt and hortatory without being too wonky. “Suppose you guys are all doing your homework…and you’re doing great on your homework, you’re getting great prizes, you’re getting fabulous prizes,” Jake said to his peers in the audience, his voice rising. “You’re doing it all wrong!” Forget being the top scholar, getting the 4.0 GPA, making the dean’s list. If you really want to contribute, Jake had a TED-tailored mantra at the ready: You need to stop learning and start thinking, in your own unique way, and then you’ll start creating. From Isaac Newton (barred from Cambridge University by an outbreak of the plague), he segued to his own story of being stymied by school (bored in special ed, barred from college for a semester by childish klutziness). “What did I do? Did I stop learning and just start playing video games and stuff? NO!! I started thinking about shapes.” Having so far skirted one of his mother’s favorite words, passion, he couldn’t resist closing with the classic exhortation to his peers to find theirs.

  Whether he knew it or not, Jake was echoing the most successful TED talk of all time, the education adviser and speaker Ken Robinson’s plea to upend traditional pedagogy and let children’s curiosity and strengths take the lead. But Jake issued his call to inhabit your own head with the authority of someone who knew, in very unusual ways, what that meant. Helen Keller, notably enough, had taken up the same theme in The Story of My Life. Arrived at Radcliffe, which she had revered as “the wonderland of Mind” and considered proof of prestigious arrival, she “soon discovered that college was not quite the romantic lyceum I had imagined. I used to have time to think, to reflect, my mind and I. We would sit together of an evening and listen to the inner melodies of the spirit.” Nostalgic for the peace of nondistraction, Keller regretted that “in college there is no time to commune with one’s thoughts,” and anticipated Jake’s refrain. “One goes to college to learn, it seems,” she wrote, “not to think,” which didn’t stop her from doing both.

  The savant paradigm, associated though it is with the idea of spontaneous giftedness, delivers a rather different insight: children’s minds are their own to shape—yet even prodigies can rarely do that fruitfully alone. Fine-tuning with a glorious future in view misses the point. Childhood needs protecting, and the wonderland, as Keller put it, better be in the unfolding. Jake at fifteen lucked into a veritable lyceum, and his family was ready to move to Waterloo, Canada, to keep him company. In 2013, to quote his immensely proud mother, he “became the youngest person ever accepted into the Scholars International program at the Perimeter Institute for Advanced Physics, the second-highest-rated institution for the study of theoretical physics worldwide.” Perimeter, founded in 1999 by the founder of BlackBerry, had designed the master’s-level program to draw young math and physics talent from around the world with its intensive curriculum. Tuition, room, and board were free—crucial for the Barnetts.

  There was more: blackboards everywhere (should the urge to brainstorm strike), pass-fail grading, no exams, and a focus on group work. The Perimeter Institute director who had dreamed up the scholars program, the South African theoretical physicist Neil Turok, pushed back against the Lewis Terman tradition. “It’s the outliers, the oddballs, the unusual kids who often have the most to offer,” he liked to stress. “And our whole system has turned into a factory,” he said of the status quo. “We crank people through—certificates, qualifications, degrees—and stultify, don’t reward creativity and unusual ideas.” Which wasn’t to say that Turok was ready to romanticize misfits or endorse grandiose visions. He was wary of hearing (as he often did) people “who come to you and say ‘I’m going to make the next unified theory, or I’m going to show Einstein is wrong.’ That sends all the bells off the wrong way, because at that point in your development you really don’t know enough to make claims like that.”

  What a prodigious savant in midadolescence needed, Turok appreciated, was the kind of leeway that any driven young high-performer can use. “My main job with Jacob is, where possible, to take the pressure off him,” he said as the institute’s new recruit arrived. “I tell him, ‘You’re here to play and have fun. We don’t have any expectations. Don’t put pressure on yourself. Your enthusiasm is your biggest asset; just protect that.’ We’ll see where it goes.”

  All three boys had been lucky recipients of versions of that message ever since they were small—and they hadn’t been very clued into other people’s expectations anyway. In Jake’s case, as in Matt’s, the burdens of autism brought an ironic benefit: the presence of grown-ups in their lives who, however determined they were to front-load intensive training for their children, quickly discovered the limits of being in a goal-driven hurry. If the boys’ gifts could help them engage with the world as they grew, that was progress. And if the most basic lesson they and their parents and mentors learned from one another was undaunted curiosity about what might lie in store, that marked a real advance, too.

  CHAPTER 8

  Tiger Parents, Super Children

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  In October 2009, the glamorous Chinese pianist Lang Lang stood on the stage at Carnegie Hall next to a small Asian-American version of himself. Marc Yu, who had been named a Davidson Institute for Talent Development fellow four years earlier, had acquired more than front teeth since then. Now ten, he had the moussed, mussed hair and red socks of an acolyte. He had just finished a performance with Lang Lang of Schubert’s Rondo in A Major for four hands, part of a Lang Lang and Friends program that featured several other young protégés. Marc had displayed his musical mastery. He had also clearly been practicing the flourishes of his idol, famous for conveying passion—“my hallmark,” as Lang Lang put it—in more than just his sound at the piano. The swaying body, floating hands, mobile face: Marc had absorbed the repertoire. When Lang Lang handed the microphone to Marc, whom he had met three and a half years earlier, he knew he could count on the California prodigy to say something imaginative. To Lang Lang’s question about how it felt to play in Carnegie Hall, Marc replied, “It’s one of those magical places where the gods live, or fairies. And I would love to come back.”

  Everyone knows the joke about how to get to Carnegie Hall: practice, practice, practice—the route Jay Greenberg had skirted, and a goad Matt Savage hadn’t much needed as he progressed (unlike most children on piano benches, as parents often discover). Marc had made toil his mantra ever since being named a Davidson Institute fellow—“You should play Game Boy less, and you should practice more”—but the message of this buoyant evening was the transporting power of music. The program, with a cast of performers who were all of Asian descent, featured twenty-seven-year-old Lang Lang as a catalyst of the remarkable surge in classical music vitality under way in China. The virtuoso spillover was transforming U.S. conservatories and stages, and with his newly launched Lang Lang International Music Foundation, he aimed to ride—and help guide—a wave of prodigious young talent around the world. Awakening an audience, a new generation of music lovers, was on the agenda, too. The theme was not perspiration. Lang Lang’s website summed up his signature aura. “If one word applies to Lang Lang, to the musician, to the man, to his worldview, to those who come into contact with him, it is ‘inspiration.’ It resounds like a musical motif through his life and career.”

  In fact, a second, rather different word—competition—was also at the heart of Lang Lang’s story, which was a world away from savant sagas. Music offered Matt a route from social isolation to gratifying interaction. Striving to be set apart was the theme of Lang Lang’s ghostwritten memoir, published in 2008 in two versions, Journey of a Thousand Miles: My Story and a youth edition called Lang Lang: Playing with Flying Keys. The odyssey that had brought Lang Lang to his Carnegie Hall debut at eighteen in 2001 had been driven by the phrase “Number One.” Throughout his childhood in rank-obsessed Chin
a, he said, the words “never left my consciousness, at least not while I was playing.” Lang entered his first piano contest at the age of five, and his father, Lang Guoren, made it clear that winning was essential—that day and for years to come. In China’s cutthroat, hierarchical musical world, one high-stakes challenge after another lay ahead: it was the most old-fashioned of prodigy gauntlets, presided over by all-powerful grown-ups. The preteen computer or chess geek could flout parental desires and standards, but not the miniature musician. Doing merely well, a small boy glued to the piano was never allowed to forget, would sabotage the ultimate goal.

  Spiky-haired, flamboyantly emotive Lang Lang was the last sort of model or mentor you would expect to emerge from such unremitting pressure to excel. He was a physical, not just a musical, rebuke to “the robot stereotype,” as one reviewer put it—the notion “that Asian musicians are all technique and no feeling, precision without soul.” He was, in short, the man for a moment when a rising China and a recession-stunned America were both second-guessing their talent development traditions. Never mind geopolitical rivalry, currency battles, trade imbalances. The classical music realm, with a global dynamo like Lang Lang in it, offered a vision of a hybrid East-West approach to extraordinary achievement: a convergence of Chinese-style rigor and expressive American vigor—each asset vaunted by a culture also well aware that it could use a dose of the other virtue. Vibrant creativity, after all, surely called for both. And Lang Lang supplied an ideal extra ingredient, a dash of rock-star-rebel allure.

  “The Lang Lang Effect,” the Today show called the fallout in China, where his flashy prowess was credited with spreading the well-known national zeal for piano training. As any Chinese parent could have told you, learning an instrument was a high-prestige extracurricular pursuit, with the added benefit of promoting academic excellence. (The disciplined focus ideally paid off in school, and the best young musicians might get a boost in a college race dominated by the dreaded entrance exam, the gaokao.) As any Chinese kid could have told you, there was no choice but to comply—and now a world-famous idol had given lessons cachet. An aura of fun and hero-worship was just the upstart appeal a generation of stressed-out young grinds could use.