'Bluejay' Spreads His Wings

Jay Greenberg is an American composer who some say is the greatest musical genius to come along in 200 years. He wrote five symphonies by the time he was 13 years old.

Correspondent Scott Pelley first met Jay two years ago when his works were being performed on stage; the story was seen by executives at Sony BMG, who signed Jay as a recording artist. Recently, Pelley caught up with the young composer again in Britain, where the London Symphony Orchestra was recording Jay's fifth symphony.

He wrote every note for each and every instrument — and the really amazing part is that he wrote it in just a few hours.

Composer Sam Zyman says we haven't seen his like in probably 200 years. "We are talking about a prodigy of the level of the greatest prodigies in history when it comes to composition. I am talking about the likes of Mozart, and Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns," he tells Pelley.

Zyman taught music theory to Jay at the Julliard School in New York, where he has been teaching 19 years.

"This is an absolute fact. This is objective. This is not a subjective opinion," Zyman says. "Jay could be sitting here, and he could be composing right now. He could finish a piano sonata before our eyes in probably 25 minutes. And it would be a great piece."

How is it possible? Jay told Pelley he doesn't know where the music comes from — but that it comes fully written, playing like an orchestra in his head.

"As you hear it playing, can you change it as it goes along? Can you say to yourself, 'Oh, let's bring the oboes in here,' or 'Let's bring the string section here?'" Pelley asks.

"No, they seem — they seem to come in by themselves if they need to," Jay replies. "It's as if the unconscious mind is giving orders at the speed of light. You know, I mean, so I just hear it as if it were a smooth performance of a work that is already written when it isn't."

Jay's parents are as surprised by his talent as anyone. Neither of them is a professional musician. His father, Robert, is a linguist, a scholar in Slavic languages who lost his sight at the age of 36 to retinitis pigmentosa. His mother, Orna, is an Israeli-born painter.

Michael, Jay's 10-year-old brother, is not a musical prodigy, but Robert and Orna remember when they figured out that Jay was.

"I think around, two, when he started writing and actually drawing instruments, we knew that he was fascinated with it," his mother explains.

At the ago of 2, she says, Jay started writing and managed to draw and ask for a cello. "I was surprised, because neither of us have anything to do with string instruments. And I didn't expect him to know what it was," Orna says.

"What a cello was?" Pelley asks.

"Right," she replies.

Orna says there was no cello in the house and that her son had never seen a cello before. But he knew he wanted one.

So his mother brought him to a music store where he was shown a miniature cello. "And he just sat there. He put the cello. And he started playing on it. And I was like, 'How do you know how to do this?'" Orna remembers.

By age 3, Jay was still drawing cellos, but he had turned them into notes on a scale. He was beginning to compose.

"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. But the teachers would get angry, and they would call us in for emergency meetings, you know, with seven people, sitting there trying to figure out how they're going accommodate our son," Robert explains.

"Or stop him," Orna adds. In second grade, she says her son was "very problematic."

Jay has been told his hearing is many times more sensitive than an average person's. The sound of the city has to be shut out manually, but Jay can't turn off the music in his head. In fact, he told Pelley he often hears more than one new composition at a time.

"Multiple channels is what it's been termed," Jay explains. "That my brain is able to control two or three different musics at the same time, along with the channel of every day life and everything else."

By the age of 10, Jay was going to Julliard, among the world's top conservatories of music, on a full scholarship. At age 11 he was studying music theory with third-year college students. He may be the smallest guy in class, but when the music comes up in his head, Jay has a lot of confidence about what he puts down on paper.

"Do you ever go back and say, 'No, no, no. That's not right. This should be this way instead of that way,'" Pelley asks.

"No, I don't really ever do that," Jay replies.

Asked if he goes back to edit and revise his compositions, Jay says he doesn't need to, "because it just usually comes — it comes right the first time."

Sam Adler teaches Jay at Julliard, and he agrees Jay can be great — but only if he constantly questions his gift.

"Let's take a great genius in the musical world, someone like Beethoven. When you look at a Beethoven score, it's horrendous. He didn't have an eraser. So he had to cross it out. And it looks as if, you know, he was never satisfied. And that is something that comes with maturity. And I think that's going to happen to Jay," Adler says.

Asked if it's fair to say that there is potential, Adler says, "Absolutely."

Jay's studies include piano lessons with Elizabeth Wolfe. But Jay told Pelley he doesn't need an instrument — only his mind — to write music.

Asked what happens when he first hears a tune rise in his head, Jay says, "Well, at first I just listen to it, and then I start humming it. And then while walking, and I like walking a lot when I am inspired. Because then I walk to the beat of the music … and I often start conducting as well."

In 2004, Jay was not an average 12-year-old — and he knew it. Catching onto baseball isn't as natural as playing piano.

When Pelley caught up with Jay nearly two years later at the Abbey Road Studios in London, his fifth symphony was in the hands of the London Symphony Orchestra, recording for Sony BMG.

In the studio where the Beatles recorded and the "Star Wars" films were scored, Jay heard his symphony for the first time.

Asked where he was when he first started writing his fifth symphony, Jay says, "I was in room 301 of my school staring absently at a map across — on the opposite wall — bored to distraction."

The class was history. "But don't tell my teacher, OK," Jay says, laughing.

"That first day, I wrote about 23 bars of the first movement during that class and then, probably about 60 or 70 bars altogether," he recalls.

The finished work runs 190 pages and 1,328 bars. Jay's role at the studio is to make sure all the notes play just as he's imagined.

Every year or two, a brilliant child pianist or genius violin player emerges. Asked where Jay ranks, Zyman says "To be a prodigy composer is far rarer. You have to conquer these issues. 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."

Music is not the only sound Jay is listening to inside his head. He's interested in just about everything — and, for now, he sees music almost as a hobby not necessarily his destiny.

"For example, one thing — I might study physics or psychology or as I mentioned, the computer science or cartography or a lot of other things," Jay explains.

Pelley says Jay's mind makes him the most mystifying interview he has ever done. As he talks, you can see in his eyes that he's thinking about or listening to a dozen other channels.

Asked what would make him happy, Jay says, "That's a good question. Who can really define happiness?"

For Jay, happiness seems to flow from keeping his mind challenged.

Many accomplished composers spend a lifetime writing no more than five symphonies. Jay wrote his fifth at age 13. It's impossible to know where his mind will take him — and us — but, the 60 Minutes team noticed that at the end of the recording session he was getting bored. As the orchestra played the last bars of this work, Jay pulled out his paper and started writing another.
Produced By Catherine Herrick