Crafting a cantata of their own

Alexis Wright, 9 years old, concurred, though this year has complicated the picture a bit. "All the composers are dead," she said, "so it's been fun to work with somebody who is actually alive!"

That living, breathing anomaly of a composer is Andy Vores, chair of the composition department at Boston Conservatory. He and other musicians have been working with the school's music teacher to help the children write their own piece. In a phone interview earlier this week, Jakob and Alexis casually shared recent discoveries about techniques of orchestration, about the range of a trumpet, and the special effects that can be produced when bows are played on stringed instruments upside down. At one point Jakob even sang a few bars of an arching melody into the phone. "My friend Lee and I made that last part," he announced. "We actually created that."

Alexis and Jakob's newfound compositional zeal, and their contact with Vores, is thanks to an innovative program called Classroom Cantatas, developed and run by the Cantata Singers. Conceived by its then-executive director Ann Marie Lindquist and now in its 15th year, the program places music professionals in urban schools for 12-week residencies, during which they work with students who often have no prior musical background, aiding them in the creation of their own music that is then performed at the end of the year.

Since its inception, the program has reached some 2,000 students across about a dozen schools. There have been pieces written about the indigenous peoples of Chiapas, Mexico, about Fenway Park, and about the human body, complete with songs in praise of individual organs such as the spleen. This year the students are setting two short poems by Christina Rossetti called "The Caterpillar" and "Wrens and Robins."

"For so many people music is a passive activity, and the children we were hoping to serve were not having the opportunity for even that passive activity, let alone an active one," said David Hoose, music director of Cantata Singers. "We wanted some kind of program that engaged the children in doing their own work, and that wasn't about visiting the school and then leaving 45 minutes later never to be seen again."

For its current anniversary year, Classroom Cantatas is experimenting with a newly integrated approach. The melodies created by the two fourth-grade classes at NHCS will be the basis of their own independent work, but they will also be incorporated into the middle movements of a newly commissioned piece by Vores titled "Natural Selection," written for the Cantata Singers. Both works as well as additional music by Bach and Britten will be performed on May 8 in Jordan Hall. The Boston Children's Chorus and students from NHCS will be among the singers.

According to Vores, the settings that the students devised were not as straightforward as one might imagine. "I transcribed it exactly as they sang it - so there are some very curious shifts of tempo which are completely [intuitive] for them," he said. Vores and the education team of the Cantata Singers also worked with the students on orchestrating their tunes. A few initially had in mind the sounds of drum machines and electric guitars but were delighted to learn that acoustic instruments could produce very similar sounds. "Once they knew what sort of things we were asking them for," Vores said, "it seemed to be very very natural."

In a way, the larger ethos of the Classroom Cantatas project fits perfectly with the chorus' focus this season on the music of Britten. Among modern composers, Britten wrote particularly inspired music for young performers, including the children's opera "Noye's Fludde" which the chorus produced locally earlier this year.

"Britten trusts the child performers - he knows they can do some very sophisticated things quite naturally," Vores said. "In my own settings, if you look at the tempo shifts - some might say they are too complicated for the children to perform. But they are the ones who created them."

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.