Pianoforte> Teen records CD of his own works – when he’s not practicing driving

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Jack Barter likes to drive. Of course he does. He’s a 16-year-old with a learner’s permit.

He drives with certainty, like he plays the piano.

We are driving to a public supper at the Sorrento Community Building, where Jack will play “Sorrento Harbor,” one of seven original compositions on his new CD, “Jack.” He wears long, Army-green cargo shorts with big pockets, a white T-shirt and a melon-colored overshirt, which he got for 10 cents the other day at the Milbridge redemption center.

Jack is happy because my car is standard shift, his favorite kind of driving. “Why don’t I drive, so you can take notes,” he says, sounding innocent and helpful. Yeah, right.

He aims assuredly at Route 1 from his home on the Franklin-Sullivan line, his dark eyes straight ahead, his right sideburn in profile. From Route 1, we turn east and roll past a golf course in the pinkish 6 o’clock light. Jack observes that the car has no tachometer, a fact that has escaped me in three-and-a-half years of driving it.

The drive over, he has no choice but to focus on the task at hand. “Now I’m nervous,” he says, walking a gravel path uphill to the Community Building. “If you want to write that.”

Jack has been playing the piano since he was 2 or 3 years old. As a small child, he sang constantly, recalls his mother, Priscilla Barter, and when she asked him, “Where do you hear this?” he answered, “I hear it in my mind.”

The parents of six older children, Priscilla and Phil Barter, the well-known Maine artist, held off giving Jack lessons until he was 10.

“They didn’t want to scare me off,” the young man says. “They wanted to keep the joy. I have friends who lost the joy a long time ago.”

The joy is quite evident in a videotape made when Jack was 4 or 5, which his mother shows me in spite of her son’s protests and embarrassment. “What am I supposed to play?” asks young Jack, who looks a lot like older Jack.

The little boy looks self-conscious before the camera, until he starts playing. The song is “Bobby and Eddie Are My Friends Today,” an unbearably adorable ditty about the family’s two ducks.

“We had everyone singing that — the carpenters, everyone,” remembers Priscilla Barter.

“I wasn’t very good at ending them,” Jack remarks, as the song goes on.

Nowadays, Jack plays classical music, favoring Chopin and aggressive pieces like Bach’s “Praludium II,” which he works on when he’s not crafting his own music. He’s composing a piece now for his brother Matt, a painter, about his life and art.

“You’ve got to know who you’re making a song about,” Jack says of this mysterious process. “I get started with a couple of chords, then a melody, then notes that give me a picture of what type of man he is.”

Jack’s use of the word “picture” is no coincidence. He has said that when he sees paintings, he hears music, and he describes his own music as visual. This is to be expected of a kid who grew up in the Barter Family Gallery. Jack’s grand piano stands in a room filled with his father’s vibrant paintings and painted furniture, on a rug braided by his mother. Lucky gallery-goers get to browse there while Jack is practicing.

It’s hard to say when that might be, because Jack has a life. “I’m not one to practice 24 hours a day,” says the mountain-biking chess player, who favors math and science in his home-school curriculum.

“We’ve encouraged him to think of his talent as part of a whole,” says Phil Barter.

Because Jack’s piano lessons started later in life, he is still mastering the art of reading music. He has never written down the music for most of his own pieces, composing and playing them by ear.

His mother would like him to practice more, and his teacher, Elizabeth Brunton, probably wouldn’t object. When he sits down at the piano, though, Jack isn’t content going over and over the same territory. He prefers to plunge into something with a challenge, even if it means he sounds less perfect and polished.

One senses that his new CD is more important to his family than it is to Jack. To him, pieces like “Sorrento Harbor” are part of the past. He’s moving forward. To a mother and father, they’re treasured snapshots of a youngest child who will soon leave the nest. The other six siblings are all married, underlining Jack’s identity as the last hatchling.

“One of the reasons I did it was to have a record of my music,” he says. “It’s like having a microscope. What’s there is right there, and the rest kind of fades out.”

Jack’s maternal grandfather, Robert Wesley Holcomb, was a musician and composer who studied at the Boston Conservatory of Music. He lost the use of one hand to polio when Jack’s mother was a little girl. When Jack was a child, their musical styles were incompatible. Holcomb was serious; his grandson was intent on having fun. Jack finally stopped playing with his grandfather.

Jack, while very well-mannered, has a healthy willingness to question authority. When I ask him to name five CDs in his collection, he wants to know, “Why is that important?” When I explain that I’m interested in the music a musician keeps on hand, he complies gladly, listing Benny Goodman, the Chemical Brothers, U2, Bob Dylan and Crystal Method.

His own range is similarly wide, and his self-titled CD includes the Highland-themed “Scottish Meadows” as well as a swinging Gershwin tribute.

Like many kids his age, Jack is unimpressed with Maine radio. “It’s country music land,” he laments. “There’s 20 country music stations, no rock, except in Portland, and two pop stations that play the same things over and over.”

He is the first to admit that his talent can feel like a rock around his neck. It makes life more complicated.

“If I didn’t have this [gift for music], I’d just be a carpenter or a plumber, or go on to higher education,” he says. “With this motivating thing, when I move out, I have to figure out a way to keep going. I don’t want to move this 2,000-pound piano. … But I don’t want to give up music.”

When he meets people, Jack doesn’t mention the piano. If it comes up, it comes up. “Most of the time they’re surprised I have a CD,” he says.

Surprise looks likely at the Sorrento recital. Most of the people gathered for supper don’t know Jack, and they don’t know what to expect.

A large painting by Jack’s dad has just been installed in Sorrento’s white clapboard Town Hall, and a group drifts next door to admire it. In the Community Building, metal chairs are drawn up under taped-on paper tablecloths. Guests heap their plates with salads and cold chicken, and open bottles of wine they’ve brought with them.

While Jack is playing the upright piano in the corner, the room is quiet, except for a dropped fork and a chair pulled back with a scrape. The music goes from booming to achingly quiet, and it seems impossible that a 16-year-old could feel the loss and regret suggested by the music.

Jack walks back to his chair with a serious face that breaks into a grin at the end.

“What’s the name of the piece again?” someone asks.

“Sorrento Harbor,” someone answers.

Inspired by a recording of Dvorak’s “New World” Symphony that he loved as a little kid, “Sorrento Harbor” is not a favorite of Jack’s these days.

“It’s one of those pieces people view as emotional,” he says with a hint of exasperation. He’s sitting high on his parents’ roof deck, amid the quiet music of the wind in the pines.

He explains that he can be in a perfectly normal, happy mood while writing a minor-key piece that will make people feel sad.

“I don’t like the answers people give when they hear it — `You’re beautiful,’ `You’re such a romantic guy.”‘

At the moment, he’d rather just be a 16-year-old with a learner’s permit, whose parents have promised to buy him a truck when he gets his license.

“I’m a guy,” Jack says, heading off for a late-afternoon bowl of cereal. “I’m not supposed to make people cry.”

“Jack” is available at the Barter Family Gallery or by mail. Send checks for $14 plus $2 shipping payable to the gallery, P.O. Box 102, Sullivan 04664.