And all the songs were entirely original, though the thirteen composers did give credit to their muses.

“This was inspired by Schubert,” Wang told the audience before his “Duet for Dueling Divas.”

“So if it sounds like I stole it, I did,” he says.

Salmon, who is considering music as a possible career, saw the workshop as a chance to work with someone with professional experience and to test out her material. In one of her songs she intones, “What makes it all okay? / The music that we play / What makes the dark light? / The music that we write.”

Andrew D. Sternlight ’06 says meeting Garing convinced him to do the workshop.

“I always thought I’d study government or science,” he says, “But now I’m thinking music. It was a great opportunity to meet someone who does it.”

Garring is a working composer in New York City, where she creates her own pieces, records and performs music and writes for modern dance and cabaret acts. Formerly a music concentrator in Dunster House, she said representatives of New York University’s Graduate Musical Theater program advised her to go to Harvard.

She performed in about five shows a year as and undergraduate. Her senior thesis, Supporting Rommilly, was performed at the Agassiz Theater.

Last Sunday she presented a song that her 13 workshop students challenged her to write about returning to her alma mater entitled “Going Back.”

“The greatest gift anyone can give someone is a song,” she told the audience.

—Staff writer Kristi L. Jobson can be reached at jobson@fas.harvard.edu.