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At the age of 14, American composer Jay Greenberg already has built a substantial and ever-expanding catalogue of original works that explore and renew the traditional forms of classical music, from solo piano pieces and sonatas to full-scale symphonies. In addition to his achievements, his burgeoning career is already yielding some remarkable “firsts” – he is the youngest composer ever signed to exclusive contracts with IMG Artists and with Sony Classical. The first CD release under his distinctive new agreement with Sony Classical will include the premiere recordings of his Symphony No. 5 – with José Serebrier conducting the London Symphony Orchestra – and his Quintet for Strings, with the Juilliard String Quartet and cellist Darrett Adkins.

The public first heard Greenberg’s story in a 60 Minutes interview in 2004, in which Samuel Zyman – who has taught literature and materials of music to Greenberg at the Juilliard School of Music – said that young composer’s potential puts him in the company of Mozart, Mendelssohn and Saint-Saëns, music’s most illustrious young prodigies. Greenberg’s works already have been played by orchestras across the United States including the Pittsburgh and New Haven Symphony Orchestras. A premiere performance of the Quintet for Strings at the Library of Congress in Washington, DC is being planned for later this year.

“How do you react when you encounter an early compositional gift so extraordinary that you can’t even begin to comprehend it?” Zyman wrote in The Juilliard Journal in 2003. “How do you explain to others a compositional talent so exquisitely developed at such an early age that you can barely believe it yourself? What would you do if you personally met an eight-year-old boy who can compose and fully notate half a movement of a magnificent piano sonata in the style of Beethoven, before your very eyes and without a piano, in less than an hour? How do you let the world know that the same boy, at age 10, composed a probing, original viola concerto in three movements, fully orchestrated, in just a few weeks?”

Typically of a young artist, Greenberg has little to say in explaining his creative process or describing his music. In conversation, his self-confidence and his intelligence are leavened by a sharp, playful sense of humor – the perfect means of deflecting questions about his methods. He has recently begun maintaining a catalogue of his works dating from 1999, when he began to apply himself seriously to composing. Greenberg believes there were a few earlier pieces of which he has no record, but his catalogue is already rich in full-scale compositions – in addition to five symphonies, more than a dozen piano sonatas and a wide variety of solo piano pieces, he has composed string quartets and other chamber music, three piano concertos, and concertos for the violin and the viola. In 2001, he began using a computer for composing, which enabled him to work at a much faster pace.

“I don’t usually work them out on paper,” Greenberg says simply of his composing process. “They tend to work themselves. Generally, fairly quickly.”

Born in 1991 in New Haven, Connecticut, Jay Greenberg began playing the cello when he was three years old, and he later taught himself how to play the piano. His first formal lessons in theory and composition began when he was seven; three years later he enrolled as a scholarship student in both the college and pre-college divisions of New York’s Juilliard School of Music. Greenberg’s teachers there have included Zyman, Ira Taxin, Samuel Adler, Ernest Baretta, Lance Horn and Kendall Briggs. He says he has also learned from the writings of contemporary composers, such as Stravinsky’s Poetics in Music and the Norton Lectures that Leonard Bernstein delivered at Harvard University in 1973, as well as Aaron Copland’s essays and texts on music and composition.

His Overture to 9/11 received first prize in the composition competition at the Juilliard pre-college division in 2003, and he won ASCAP Foundation Morton Gould Young Composers awards in 2004, 2005 and 2006. Among Greenberg’s most recent commissions are Short Stories for Tenor Saxophone, Percussion and Orchestra, performed at Alice Tully Hall by the Metropolitan Youth Orchestra of New York, and Hexalogue for Winds and Piano, premiered at the Swannanoa Chamber Music Festival in North Carolina.