THE THIRTEEN-YEAR-OLD WHO WON EIGHT GRAMMYS IN ONE NIGHT

You have to picture it, or you won't believe it. A boy still carrying a folded permission slip in his back pocket walks onto the Grammy stage eight separate times in a single evening. Album of the Year. Record of the Year. Song of the Year. Best Instrumental Composition. Best Classical Instrumental Solo. Best New Artist. Producer of the Year, Classical. Best Engineered Album, Classical. Somewhere around the fifth trip up the aisle the orchestra gives up trying to time him in and the room, which has been standing on and off for two hours, simply stays standing. He does not smile. He does not wave. He says the janitor's name.

Luca Starr is thirteen. He is 5'2". He wears a suit two sizes too big because, according to his older sister and manager Amara, "he's going to be tall, and we're not paying for a suit twice." He is, she adds, "extremely, extremely normal, which is the part nobody prints." He plays Chess Titans on his father's desktop. He is afraid of moths and mildly afraid of his own reflection in dark windows. He practices, on a good day, eight hours, and on a bad day, twelve, and on the days he insists are neither, he practices until his mother closes the fallboard on his hands, gently, from behind.

The origin story is by now the property of the internet, but his parents tell it slower. He was four when a tuner left the family Yamaha upright open and, without ceremony, without an audience, without knowing anyone had wandered into the room, Luca sat down and played the first sixteen bars of a Chopin nocturne he had heard exactly one time, on a car radio, three weeks earlier. His mother June, a hospice nurse who had spent the morning washing a dying man's hair, called his father Marcus, an electrical engineer, at work and made him listen down the phone line. "I thought she was crying because something was wrong," Marcus says. He is quiet for a long time. "She was crying because something wasn't."

The record that has, in the past week, rearranged the ceiling of what a debut can do is called THE SYMPHONY (DRAFT). He wrote most of it in the margins of a spiral notebook labeled MATH. The label was accurate. The album is under thirty-four minutes long, contains no vocals, no strings, no drums, and on three tracks no piano either, just the room the piano is in, breathing. "It's structural," he says, when I ask him why so much of it is so quiet. "Loud is easy. Loud is a trick. I don't want to trick anybody." He shrugs the shrug of a boy who has been told he is a genius so often it has become a kind of chore.

He is scheduled to tour twelve cities this year, ending in September with a concert billed simply as THE SYMPHONY. No city. No support. No encore printed on the program. When I ask what he wants people to feel walking out of it, he thinks about the question for so long I check the recorder, and then I check it again. Outside, the light over Kennedy Hall has gone the exact grey of the underside of a piano lid.

"I want them to feel," he finally says, "like they heard someone mean it."

Then he goes home. He eats a bowl of cereal, standing up, in the kitchen, at 3:14 a.m. His mother turns off the porch light. Nobody in the house yet knows that this is the top of the year, and that the year, from here, only goes one way.