Jay Greenberg has been compared to history's great prodigies. (AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Sony BMG Masterworks)
Still in his teens, Jay has written his fifth symphony. AP Photo/HO/Courtesy of Sony BMG Masterworks)
Excerpt of Jay Greenberg's Symphony No. 5

Bored in a history class, Jay Greenberg was staring at a map. Then it hit him. The music kept coming into his head and he had to jot it down.

What he wrote in his notebook was the first page of his fifth symphony. Some of the greatest composers, like Brahms and Schumann, had never reached that number, yet Jay had completed four already -- and he was only 12.

Now, two years later, that symphony has been recorded by the London Symphony Orchestra. The CD, which includes the Juilliard String Quartet and a guest cellist playing Jay's Quintet for Strings, is being released this month by Sony.

It's Jay's first CD, but the company has signed him to a contract for more.

Jay is being compared to the child geniuses Mozart and Mendelssohn and other great composers by some top figures in classical music. In an interview, the violinist Joshua Bell recalled his first encounter with Jay's music. During a break at a recording session, Sony officials played Bell a recording.

"I was trying to figure out what it was," Bell said. "Was it Shostakovich? No, but it was brilliant. When they told me it was written by a 12-year-old I fell on the floor. I really could not understand it.

"Then I got the CD of the whole piece," Bell said. "The last movement is just incredible. I listen to it over and over again. It's just so appealing and complex, and yet it just totally works. I don't understand how someone at that age can grasp orchestration like that. I just don't get it."

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ANATOMY OF A GENIUS

In an interview, Jay explained that the music just comes into his head. It may happen while he's walking, in school or even during tae kwon do lessons.

"Usually it chooses the most inconvenient moment to do so, when I'm miles from the nearest sheet of paper or pen, let alone a computer containing music software," he said.

He remembers what his mind plays -- and it's often not just the melody and harmony, but which instrument is playing.

"Sometimes it's just a passage," he said. "For instance, I'm walking down and I hear a certain cadence played by two oboes, a bassoon and a didgeridoo. So then I go home, and from that I take more ideas for other melodies and things that will eventually come together to form a complete piece."

It took Jay only a month to complete the symphony, most of which he wrote at his Manhattan private school.

"I don't know if I was thinking of anything in particular," he said. "I was kind of bored, actually, to be honest. I was in the middle of a history class, and we were basically supposed to be taking notes on something I already knew. So I was just sitting there staring at a map when suddenly I remembered that I had some music paper in my backpack. So I pulled it out and started writing the first page of Symphony Number 5."

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AN EARLY OBSESSION

Jay was born in New Haven, Conn., where his father, Robert, was a professor of Slavic language at Yale. Robert, who lost his vision at age 36 to retinitis pigmentosa, plays the piano and often had friends over for chamber music playing.

Jay's mother, Orna, an Israeli-born artist, said she and her husband noticed Jay's interest in music when he was a baby. They would play "Mother Goose" and Jay kept wanting to hear it again.

When Jay was 2 and living in Chapel Hill, N.C., he could read and write and he started to draw cellos. A year later, Jay got his wish -- a viola-sized cello. By 5, he could read and write music and had moved to piano.

He started composing and began weekly composition lessons with Antony John at Duke University. "After a few weeks I instituted a halftime soccer break, not for Jay's benefit but for my own because I found it exhausting trying to match his intensity!" John wrote in a note included with the CD.

Jay would wake up at 5 a.m. to compose for a few hours before going off to school, John said. By age 8, he was writing piano sonatas.

Two years later, the family, which by now included another son, moved to Macedonia for Robert Greenberg's studies. In their year in the Balkans, Jay wrote his first two symphonies.

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MAKING IT BIG

After the family moved back to New York in 2002, Jay attended the Professional Children's School as well as the Juilliard School, which set up a special college-level curriculum in composition for him.

Among his teachers was the composer Samuel Zyman, who in a 2004 profile of Jay on CBS' "60 Minutes" called him "a prodigy of the level of the greatest prodigies in history."

"I am talking about the likes of Mozart and Mendelssohn and Saint-Saens," Zyman told CBS.

David Lai, a Broadway conductor and talent scout for Sony, heard about the "60 Minutes" profile and started investigating. He met with Zyman, who showed him some of Jay's music.

"It was clear to me that assuming that Jay had done this on his own that this was a pretty extraordinary talent," Lai said. "The idea of a 12-year-old somehow knowing enough about the instruments and harmony -- to be able to create an orchestral score like this is still mind-boggling to me. I don't quite know how it's possible."

Later, in June 2005, Lai attended a performance of Jay's concerto for saxophone and percussion at Lincoln Center's Alice Tully Hall. He was struck by the music but also "when he took his bow from the box, how young he was. I knew he was young, but when you actually see it, and then compare it to the magnitude of the music, it's pretty overwhelming."

The symphony and quintet are only among Jay's latest pieces. He said he has written more than 100 works, including 17 piano sonatas, three piano concertos and five string quartets.

This summer, the Orchestra of St. Luke's commissioned him to write a violin concerto for Bell. The world premiere is scheduled for Oct. 28, 2007, at Carnegie Hall.

If all goes well, it will be turned into another Sony CD. But first, Jay must finish the piece -- and high school -- at age 15.

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asap contributor Martin Steinberg is a supervising editor for the AP.

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SUMMER CAMP IS FOR AMATEURS

NEW YORK (AP) -- What did Jay Greenberg do on his summer vacation?

The 14-year-old composer spent time promoting the release of his first CD -- a Sony album featuring his fifth symphony and string quintet.

But scheduling time for an interview was not easy. He and his family were moving from New York to New Haven, Conn. In New Haven, Jay took a course at the Eli Whitney Museum on filmmaking. He had to write a script for a video, and direct and edit it.

In late July, he went to Princeton University's campus for a two-week program for high-achieving youth. His courses included forensic science, philosophy, military strategy and digital photography.

Then he and his family were flying to Macedonia, where they lived for two years, then off to Israel to visit his grandparents.

In September, he begins his senior year of high school in New Haven, preparing to apply for college. He hopes to attend MIT, NYU or the Sorbonne in France to study film, philosophy, math and chemistry.

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Find it online:

Jay Greenberg's site: http://www.imgartists.com/?pageartist&id597

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