Variations in a minor

(Correction: Because of a reporting error, a story in yesterday's Living/Arts section about composer Natasha Sinha misidentified cellist Yo-Yo Ma as a violinist.)

MILTON -- Natasha Sinha hates talking about writing music. Her hands fly in elaborate gestures, and her face screws up in frustration.

''Obviously I can express myself," the usually gregarious 14-year-old says after a minute of silence. ''But sometimes I am in a certain mood and I can't write about it and I can't talk about it. So I play it."

On a hot June afternoon, Sinha wears a long floral skirt and a long-sleeve black shirt. Her dark brown hair flows down to the middle of her back, and she stands regally. Her large, blue-gray eyes have a curious glimmer.

As she walks down the driveway of her home in Milton, Sinha appears slightly out of place, as if she has stepped out of a classic painting.

Fitting with her look, Sinha's life has defied the restrictions of time. Before she entered high school, she had earned honors that have eluded veteran composers. By the age of 9, Sinha had won the ASCAP Foundation's Morton Gould Young Composer Award, which placed her among the country's top composers under 30 years old. She has had six compositions broadcast on Boston's Russian-American Radio and her music featured on a PBS special. She has won the Morton Gould award every year since 2000, and musicians at New York's Lincoln Center and Walter Reade Theater have performed her work.

Sinha has also emerged from what she calls ''the narrow world of composing" to play an active role in her community. She has been involved with bringing young musicians to perform for patients at Milton Hospital. Since mid-April she has been phoning municipal authorities and local businesses to build a program for recycling musical instruments.

Eminent musicians such as Tan Dun, who composed the soundtrack for ''Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," and violinist Yo-Yo Ma have praised Sinha's compositions. But her first recognition came at the New England Conservatory, where she began composition class at age 7.

''Natasha never went through an imitative period of any kind, and this is what is different about her," says Alla Cohen, an NEC composition instructor who has taught Sinha from the beginning. ''She just stumbled upon her own voice." Sinha's intense originality also explains why it might be difficult for her to discuss the process of composition, Cohen says.

Sinha started to experiment with composing at the age of 4, when she started taking piano lessons. It quickly became obvious to even her musically untrained parents that she wasn't sticking to the notes on the score sheets. For Raj and Renell Sinha, their daughter's deviation was perplexing. ''It didn't mean anything to us," Raj Sinha says.

''They sort of wanted me to get back to practicing," Natasha Sinha says.

When she continued to improvise over the next three years, her parents brought her to composition lessons to find out what was happening. With encouragement from experienced composers at the New England Conservatory such as Cohen and John Harbison, Sinha and her parents became aware that, with guidance, she could channel her improvisation into entire musical works of her own.

Cohen says she often gives Sinha stories to think about while composing, because this helps her give shape to her talent. She has told Sinha Russian fairy tales, and even the Ramayana, an epic tale from Sinha's Indian heritage, to help her structure her works, which are usually piano concertos or string quartets.

An unusual depth in perceiving music and a steely determination have propelled Sinha to national success, Cohen says. ''She would make comments like, 'I want this composition to be happy, then all of a sudden tragic, with a vision.' This is how adults perceive music, in the sense of structure."

''There's something totally magical about the battle scene in the fifth movement of the Ramayana," Sinha says. ''It made sense to turn the essence of it into music."

She says this underlying essence that music conveys, which is so hard to explain in concrete terms, is something that everyone connects with. ''I mean, look at how popular iPods are. It's not just the technology," she says. ''It helps people find themselves. It doesn't even matter if its Snoop Dogg, or whatever." Sinha says her iPod is always on shuffle, so she never knows whether she will hear Beethoven or Kelly Clarkson. ''I like both," she says.

But Sinha says she has been particularly lucky because her parents can afford her musical equipment and lessons. Her father runs a financial services company, and her mother is an optometrist.

''The problem is basically the instruments," Sinha says. She says too many children are forced to suppress their musical inclinations because they cannot buy instruments.

In April, Sinha founded Bring Out the Music, an organization that attempts to distribute neglected musical instruments to people who will actually use them. Instrument collection boxes have been placed at Milton's firehouse, public library, town hall, police station, and local businesses. Although Sinha attends high school at Phillips Academy (she just finished her freshman year), she has coordinated with Marion McEttrick, chairwoman of the Milton Board of Selectmen, and administrators at Milton High School to get the donated instruments in the hands of local students who want to play them.

Milton police chief Kevin Mearn says the station has gotten a few donations, but word about the program is just starting to spread. ''It's definitely a good reason for people to clean the house," Mearn says.

When Sinha talks about her community activism, her words pour out so fast she sometimes can't remember where she started. ''There are so many branches to this," she says. ''On Craigslist there are all these free pianos, and yet there are still so many people who want pianos. In India, music is not included in schools at all."

Sinha also plans to donate the royalties she earns from ASCAP for concert performances of her work to fund a $3,500 yearly scholarship to support music education in rural India, where many traditional instruments are becoming artifacts. The scholarship will fund a graduate of the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in Gujurat, India, who excels in both music and math, Raj Sinha says. Using the stipend, the student will teach music and math at a rural school for one year, he says.

Raj Sinha jokingly says he and Renell have been little more than taxi drivers who shuttle their daughter back and forth to her various commitments. ''Sure, we give her guidance and help her set up contacts, but all of the motivation comes from Natasha," he says.

When she is away at Phillips Academy, Sinha says she speaks to her parents two or three times a week, which she finds more than enough. She wakes at 6 a.m. every day and practices piano for two hours before class. After school, she says, she usually starts homework right away, or puts time into one of several extracurricular activities she is involved with -- Math League, Math Club, the school magazine Point/Counterpoint, or the Cantata Music Group and Choral Society. She also spends two or three hours per week composing.

''She has the balance that everyone wants," says Siobhan Alexander, 15, who is one of Sinha's closest friends at Phillips Academy. ''She gets all her work done, does it well, and still talks to everybody and has a good time. She's crazy at dances."

Although she plans to always play piano, Sinha is not sure whether to pursue composing professionally after high school. She says other interests, such as math and science, also seem appealing.

But this summer Sinha plans to finish her next work, a piano concerto. After listening to the theme she has composed for it, she has decided the concerto deserves the title ''Metamorphosis."

''I hate boundaries," she says. ''To me, this piece is about how one idea flows into another and another."