THE AMA STAGE FINALLY MEETS THE PIANIST
Variety on the pop award nobody had a category for, and the boy who won it anyway.
The American Music Awards is, historically, a show built for pop. Its trophies are voted on by the audience, its stage is engineered for spectacle, and its winners are, in most years, the artists whose singles have soundtracked the summer. On Sunday night it handed its New Artist of the Year prize to LUCA STARR, a thirteen-year-old classical pianist from Loudoun County, Virginia, whose biggest release of the year has no vocals, no features, and no radio edit.
It is the first time in the AMAs' history that the fan-voted new artist prize has gone to a classical instrumentalist. It is, per Variety's own count, the first time since the show's creation that the winner was in eighth grade. The producers, given a heads-up in the afternoon that STARR was pulling ahead in the live tally, quietly moved a Steinway D onto the stage before doors. They had rehearsed with a band. They played the boy without one.
“I didn't know I was up for this one. I didn't know it was a category. I looked at the trophy, and I said thank you, and then somebody told me I had to speak, so I spoke.”
He spoke for eleven seconds. He thanked the fans by name of the two who had, in the fan-voting window, run public campaigns for him online. He thanked his sister. He thanked June, his mother. He thanked, in a slightly halting voice, his father, who does not use social media and who was, at that moment, watching from home. Then he sat down at the Steinway and played, for the fifty seconds he had been allotted, the opening of “A Small Weather.” He did not play it faster to fit the time. He played fifty seconds of it, and stopped, mid-phrase, on the count.
Variety is not, ordinarily, a magazine that reviews acceptance speeches. This one is worth reviewing. It was the most quietly disruptive minute on a live pop-awards broadcast in years. The room, per two of our people in the balcony, did not know whether to clap. When it did clap, it clapped in the wrong place, the way a classical audience claps between movements, and STARR, without looking up, smiled at the piano for a moment and then walked off. The applause caught up with him at the wings.
Amara Starr, his sister and manager, said the family had not campaigned. “We didn't run ads. We didn't buy votes. We told the two fan communities that had been organizing on their own that if they wanted to vote, they should vote. They voted. We are, honestly, still processing it.”
The AMA New Artist trophy is now, per the ceremony's own historian, the youngest-ever winner of the category. It sits, per a photograph Amara sent us last night, on the top of the family upright at the farmhouse, next to a Boston Red Sox cap and a stack of unopened fan mail. STARR, who was in bed by the time the show ended on the East Coast, did not comment further.