New London - It wasn't unusual for Connecticut College music professor Arthur Krieger to ask his colleague Linda Skernick to play a piece written by one of his students at a recital in December.

"He looked at me out of corner of his eye and said, 'It's not one of my college students,'" as Skernick tells it. "He looked at me again and he said, 'Well it's a Baroque piece, and it's for harpischord.' I said, 'Art, what are you not telling me?'"

He said, "The composer of this piece is 9-and-a-half years old."

"I nearly fell over," Skernick says.

That student, Noah Shafner, has since become something of a celebrity in local music circles, after Skernick played his work at Orchestra New England's BaroqueFest 2011 concert in New Haven last month.

Now 10 years old, the Solomon Schechter Academy student and New London resident is a Baroque music aficionado who composes music, plays piano and hopes to become a conductor. His favorite composer is Bach.

"I had these ideas in my head for a long time so I just processed it to get what I want," Shafner explains.

He started tinkering around on the piano when he was 5 years old, and began lessons a year later. It was something he found on his own, without any prodding from his parents, he says.

"My dad plays guitar, but I don't like that kind of music," he says, matter-of-factly. "Or the guitar."

Skernick says Shafner's piece, a suite in C minor, is "not good for a 10-year old - it's good for good. It's extremely beautiful, very interesting music."

Krieger, Shafner's composition teacher, says the young student came to him "with this profound love of Johann Sebastian Bach."

"Not only that he admired him, but he wanted to master (the music)," Krieger says. "You might say that's unusual for children of his generation... not only among children but among all people."

Piano and harpsichord teacher John Metz, of Waterford, remembers first meeting Shafner at about 8 years old, when he played "the great Bach tocatta in D minor."

"He's a small kid," Metz recalls, so the higher and lower parts of the piece meant Shafner had to move around to reach all the necessary keys.

"It was sort of like an old-fashioned typewriter... he had to shift his way across the keyboard," Metz says. "He had the first half memorized... It was pretty amazing."

Shafner's passion for music of another era extends to other mediums - he likes to watch historical movies and documentaries, such as one on Louis XIV, and is now reading a book on Renaissance costuming that was translated from Italian. And if that doesn't seem strange enough for a 10-year-old, he also says he likes to clean his room.

But his mother, Melissa Shafner, who teaches writing at Mitchell College and is not musically inclined herself, promises Noah is more kid than prodigy.

"He's found these little niches and likes learning about stuff," she says. "He's very normal in so many respects," like watching TV and not wanting to go to bed when it's time.

Her son is also "opinionated about what he wants to do and how he wants to do it," she says.

Skernick says Shafner insisted on writing the music by hand, since there were no computers in the 17th and 18th centuries,

presenting a bit of a challenge when she played his music.

"He may be very mature and sophisticated as far as music goes, but his handwriting is that of a 10-year-old," Skernick says, with laugh.

He also rewrote some of the piece after Skernick had learned it, and when Skernick protested, he answered that Chopin rewrote his music up until the last second.

Even on the big night at BaroqueFest, when Skernick played the piece, Shafner was revising in his head.

"He really listens to things with a musician's ear," Melissa Shafner says. So rather than basking in his accolades, her son's response was to tell her he wanted to change back some of the revisions he had made.

"The audience was quite surprised," Krieger says. "They did give him a standing ovation and I think it was heartfelt... Who knows where he'll be as he grows."

k.warchut@theday.com