While most teenagers spend their time trying to compose themselves in the face of everyday life and peer pressure, a group of students in the Shaler Area School District has been composing music.

Robin Rombach, Post-Gazette Local composer Jim Whipple conducts flute players Becky Bojarski, left, 14, Becky Wadsworth, 14, and Erin Browning, 15, during a practice at Shaler Intermediate School. Whipple is opening up the world of composing classical music to students as part of the Meet the Composer program in the Shaler Area School District. Click photo for larger image. Meet the Composer:'Shaler Area Showcase' Where: Elfinwild Presbyterian Church, Shaler. When: 3 p.m. Sunday. Tickets: Free; 412-342-4444. Featuring: Works by Kaitlin Akif, Efrain Amaya, Janelle Bigler, Katie Brown, Gregory Davis, Jen Glasser, Alison Jezak, Emily Larrimer, Chelsea Mazatta, Sarah Patnesky, Liz Russo, Ellen Spondike, Hannah Sowden and James Whipple.

A three-year Meet the Composer program, wrapping up this weekend with a special concert, has opened up the usually arcane world of classical composition to students. While many of these teenagers are proficient on a musical instrument, they are far more likely to have written a poem or sketched a drawing than composed a piece of music.

"In English class, you write some poems or paragraphs, but not in music [class]," said Jim Whipple, one of two local composers who worked with students at Shaler. "I tried to connect writing an essay with writing music -- you collect ideas and build. It was to take some of the mystery out of it."

For the Meet the Composer "New Residency," one of several nationwide sponsored by the New York-based service organization, Whipple and fellow composer Efrain Amaya got funding from the Heinz Endowments and others and partnered with Gateway to the Arts to form the residency at Shaler. Gateway, a local arts and education advocacy group headed by Lisa Hoitsma, helped get the composers into the schools and provided logistical support. The local ensemble Renaissance City Winds, for which Whipple plays bassoon, was engaged to perform many of the pieces they and the students wrote. The residency operated with trial and error, but Whipple feels it ultimately was a success.

"I was amazed at the intuition that these young kids had," he said. "They had a sixth sense." The residency involved Whipple first teaching basics of form, scales and melody to the students. Then they composed tunes or motifs that he harmonized.

"In terms of specific notes, it was all [theirs]," said Whipple. "The kids provided the melody and I provided the form -- I did a setting of it." Whipple collaborated on about 50 compositions this way, with the Renaissance City Winds performing many of them in various concerts. In some cases the students performed the pieces themselves, as then-seventh-grader Liz Russo did this past June in a showcase concert during the National Performing Arts Convention in Pittsburgh. "She was unfazed," said Whipple.

Whoever played the works, however, it was that moment of performance that brought the whole project home for the student composers.

"It is really neat and kinda made me feel special," said Jessica Zozos. This freshman at Shaler composed, and then, also last June, performed on the flute her piece for concert band, "Running With the Wind," which the Shaler Intermediate School Concert Band premiered last June.

"Hearing the group perform it was like 'Wow!' " Sarah Patnesky said of her piece, "Magical Moments." Now a 10th-grader at Shaler, she started working with Whipple in seventh grade because she wanted to expand her knowledge of music from playing the alto saxophone to composing for it. "I have always been very interested in music and was, like, why not try it and further my musical skills?" she said. "He showed us the basics of composition, and then he gave us some advice when we were writing."

"I had started on my own and didn't know what to do, and he helped me a lot," added Zozos.

Patnesky's experience in composing "Magical Moments," on the program this weekend, has prompted her to want to study music education in college, where she hopes to continue to compose.

Zozos plans to go into medicine, but she won't abandon the flute or her newfound ability to compose. "I like to express myself, and it think I can do that through music," she said.

Whipple and Amaya also used the grant to write music of their own. Amaya, a Carnegie Mellon University composer, wrote several concert pieces. Whipple finished concert works as well but also wrote some music for the residency's media sponsor WQED, including some lighthearted station mottos and fund-raiser fanfares.

It is the unusual creativity he uncovered in the students, however, that Whipple will most remember from this project. "It was stuff I wouldn't have done had I not been asked to do it," he said. The challenge and fun was "finding the personality of each and working with them so it had its own sense of personality. There was one girl intrigued by Japanese music through Pokeman, so she worked with Japanese instruments and sounds."

One student, Emily Larrimer, died from a brain tumor during her time in the program, said Whipple. "She had written a wonderful piece, 'March of the House Elves.' I've made four versions of it." Two of the versions will be heard at the concert.

Whipple hopes to continue the project in some fashion, since the New Residency program nationwide has ended. "We ran the program for 10 years though, which is a good long time," said Heather Hitchens, president of Meet the Composer. "We are taking this opportunity to evaluate our progress and success with the program and dream up our next big residency project."

The Pittsburgh residency not only brought teens into a world they were more adept at than they thought, but also it got "composers out of the university and writing for the community, bands, radio stations, groups, arts education," said Whipple. "[We are getting] the word out that there are composers out there; they aren't just dead in Germany."

Indeed, when Whipple started the residency in 2002, he asked his classes to describe a composer. "The kids described an old man in old clothes," he said, laughing. "But there are a lot alive."

These students alone are proof of that.