Students Share Their Music With Shut-Ins : Community Service: Group of Westlake and Harvard students learn by bringing cheer to others.

Shawn Landres is a musician and composer who has his fingers on the keyboards and in a lot of pies.

At academically rigorous Harvard School in Studio City, his classes include French IV, Latin V and, next semester, a course he helped develop called “War.”

Last summer, he attended a top-notch music camp. This spring, the 17-year-old will play Tevye in a school production of “Fiddler on the Roof.”

He is as facile at the word processor as at the keyboard. As news editor of the school paper this fall, he churned out story after story on the controversial proposed merger of his prestigious prep school with Westlake School for Girls in Holmby Hills.

By then, Landres was experienced at getting Westlake and Harvard together. He and Westlake senior Hillarie Hirsch had already orchestrated an ad hoc Westlake-Harvard union called “Vivace,” a loose confederation of music makers whose name is taken from the musical term for lively.

Landres and Hirsch conceived of the group earlier this year as a way to do what they liked to do and what they were supposed to do at the same time.

The high-priced private schools require their students, many of whom are hard-charging achievers raised in Westside affluence, to perform community service.

Landres said he scanned the usual community service options and noticed there was no program to bring live music to people who were otherwise unable to obtain it.

Now there is. “Vivace” is composed of a jazz quartet, madrigal singers, a string quartet and a coeducational chorus. In its various permutations, students have performed for hospitalized children, senior citizens, cancer patients and the homeless.

Along the way, Hirsch and Landres said they have gotten a lot more than a few credits, learning instead what they have to give and how much it can mean to the recipients.

Sounding a little awe-struck months after a performance at UCLA Hospital, Hirsch described the loving, blissful expressions on sick children’s faces as they asked for more songs.

More songs was one order of business at a recent rehearsal in the living room of Landres’ Santa Monica home. As musical director, Landres had convened the after-school practice session to prepare for a holiday program at the Senior Health Connection, a health education and information group run by Santa Monica Hospital.

Landres said he tries to tailor the show to the audience and has learned from questionnaires sent out after the performance what worked and what didn’t.

For instance, the red “Vivace” T-shirts, designed by a Harvard student, were developed after one of their hosts expressed some reservations about the group’s typical teen-age garb. Landres said the group has been told repeatedly to keep the songs upbeat and familiar, with one person rejecting Paul Simon’s lyric, “Silence like a cancer grows.”

Standing at his keyboard, Landres presented the singers a few new numbers “older people would know.” One of them, “All the Things You Are,” was described by Landres as a Jerome Kern-Oscar Hammerstein tune from a failed Broadway musical.

“I can see why the musical flopped,” quipped Matt Eddy after an anemic first run-through of the ballad.

The group moved on to “Summertime” and “I Believe in You.” The vocal part of the rehearsal ended with a more familiar (to them), jazzy version of “Hark the Herald Angels Sing,” with trumpeter Jason Gamer doing the harking.

Gamer, who wants to be a professional musician, said his favorite “Vivace” gig was at Turning Point, a shelter for homeless people in Santa Monica where the jazz quartet played a set. Afterward, according to Gamer, a resident of the shelter said, “Oh, man, that was great. You ate that horn up. You guys really have a good thing going. Stick with it.”

Gamer said it was then he realized that what he took for granted could be very special to others.

One thing that made the Turning Point performance particularly rewarding, added guitarist Phil Bower, 18, was the way an initially remote audience warmed to the music.

Bower also recalled an impromptu encore at the Wellness Community in Santa Monica for people coping with cancer. One woman requested a samba. Then, as the group improvised, people got up and started dancing. “That was pleasing to me,” said Bower. “That’s what I think music’s all about. Music should make people happy.”

At UCLA Medical Center’s pediatrics unit, the students paired up, donned masks and surgical garb and took their songs directly to patients’ bedsides, Hirsch said. The sick children were isolated after receiving treatments for cancer that made them susceptible to infections.

A larger group serenaded other patients and staff in the playroom. Landres said the children were spellbound. “That moment I realized that what I was doing was really a good thing,” he said.

A few days after the rehearsal at Landres’ home, it was show time. The audience of about 60 Senior Health Connection members listened with delight as the young musicians performed a potpourri of music. Madrigal groups from both schools sang, the jazz quartet performed several numbers and Landres played three piano solos. The group sang holiday songs and show tunes--but “All the Things You Are” did not make the cut.

Gerontologist Ishara Bailis, program coordinator at the Senior Health Connection, praised the musicians and the ability of music to “bring out people in a way nothing else can.”

The youths, with their energy and verve, impressed the audience, some of whom harbor a darker view of teen-agers in general, Bailis said.

Indeed, when each audience member was asked to express a wish for the new year, one man in the front row rose and said he hoped “we’ll keep having great kids like this show up here.”