12 year old music prodigy12/4/2023 Today, he's an accomplished composer and professor of Jay's at Juilliard. "It just usually comes right the first time." Does he ever revise one of his compositions? "No, I don't really ever do that," says Jay. When the music enters Jay's head, he has a lot of confidence about what he puts down on paper. But Jay has written five at the age of 12. Talented composers might write five or six symphonies in a lifetime. How do you notate this rhythm? What's the range of the oboe? Can this be played on the piano? How do you compose for the harp? There are hundreds of thousands of bits of information that you need to master to be able to write a piece of music." "To be a prodigy composer is far rarer," says Zyman. How does Jay rank among other child prodigies? The treble became bass, bass became treble, and did it backwards." But he actually took the clefs and inverted them. "So he took the volume and literally did just that. Last week, he took the Beethoven sonata we're working right now, and decided that everything would be kind of interesting upside down and backwards," says Wolff. What happens when Jay gets bored? "He gets restless, and then he starts improvising. Even though Jay's a genius, he's still a kid. Catching onto baseball isn't as natural as playing piano. Jay's not a usual 12-year-old, and he knows it. For example, if the beat is (piano), I start rocking.And I often start conducting as well." "Because I walk to the beat of the music. And then while walking, and I like walking a lot when I am inspired," says Jay. "At first, I just listen to it, and then I start humming it. Jay writes things he can't even play, and he says he wants to perfect his piano playing, even though he doesn't need the piano, or any instrument, to compose. Jay also takes high school courses at another school – courses his parents say he will finish when he's 14.Įlizabeth Wolff is a concert pianist who works with Jay on his piano technique. At age 11, he was studying music theory with third year college students. "And when a child that young tells you where their vision is, or where they're going, you don't have a choice."īy the age of 10, Jay was going to Juilliard, among the world's top conservatories of music, on a full scholarship. "This child told me, he said, 'I'm gonna be dead if I am not composing. "That my brain is able to control two or three different musics at the same time –- along with the channel of everyday life." "Multiple channels is what it's been termed," says Jay. In fact, he told us he often hears more than one new composition at a time. But Jay can't turn off the music in his head. The sounds of the city need to be shut out manually. Jay has been told his hearing is many times more sensitive than an average person's. "But the teachers would get angry, and they would call us in for emergency meetings with seven people sitting there trying to figure out how they're going accommodate our son." "He hears music in his head all the time, and he'll start composing and he doesn't even realize it probably, that he's doing it," says Robert. By elementary school, his teachers had no idea how to handle a boy whose hero wasn't Batman, but Beethoven. He was beginning to compose, and his parents watched the notes come faster and faster. "And I was like, 'How do you know how to do this?'"īy 3, Jay was still drawing cellos, but he had turned them into notes on a scale. And I didn't expect him to know what it was."īut Jay knew he wanted a cello, so his mother brought him to a music store where he was shown a miniature cello. And I was surprised, because neither of us has anything to so with string instruments. "He managed to draw a cello and ask for a cello, and wrote the world cello. "I think, around 2, when he started writing, and actually drawing instruments, we knew that he was fascinated with it," says Orna. His mother, Orna, is an Israeli-born painter. His father, Robert, is a linguist, and a scholar in Slavic language who lost his sight at 36 to retinitis pigmentosa. Jay's parents are as surprised as anyone. "It's as if he's looking at a picture of the score, and he's just taking it from the picture, basically," says Zyman. Jay composes so rapidly that he often crashes his computer. The program records his notes and plays them back –- that's when the computer is up and running. But Jay, with his composing program, is downloading it from his head. All the kids are downloading music these days.
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