DAVIS COUNTY — Growing up doesn’t mean a person has to stop believing in their childhood dreams.

Local freelance composer Cathy Neff makes her living by creating music for everything from choral, band and dance groups to stage musicals at Salt Lake’s Kingsbury Hall. It’s the realization of a love she’s felt since she was a small child, when she started writing the music that she could hear inside.

“It’s just always been a part of me,” she said.

Neff, who works on contract, has taken turns as both a songwriter (someone who writes individual pieces, often with lyrics, for a musical group) and a composer (someone who writes longer pieces with specific orchestration, often instrumental) over the course of her professional career. Though the two disciplines often go hand in hand, there’s still sometimes a leap required to move between the two.

“A lot of composers can’t write a song that has a hook and is catchy,” said Neff. “At the same time, a lot of songwriters don’t have enough of the knowledge needed to compose and do the larger work.”

That kind of knowledge doesn’t come automatically. Neff got her undergraduate degree in composition and theater arts, then went on to get a master’s degree in music at BYU.

“Basically, I went to school knowing that it probably wouldn’t lead to a job, but it gave me the craft I needed,” she said. “It taught me to put the music in my head on paper so that others could play it.”

These days, following the music in her head takes Neff to any number of different places. She spent the summer working with the youth theater program at the University of Utah, where she helped teach classes ranging from percussion to comedic musical theater. She also wrote the music for a new stage version of “Alice in Wonderland” that was workshopped over the summer and will officially hit the Kingsbury Hall stage in 2010.

“The kids were amazing,” said Neff, who worked on the project with director Erin Fair. “She wanted a real up-to-date version of ‘Alice.’ I did ‘Jabberwocky’ in a hip-hop style.”

Neff, who adapted “Jungle Book” earlier this year and will be working on a stage version of “James and the Giant Peach” next spring, has plenty of experience helping find the music inside well-known books.

“Sometimes I’ll set the poems in the story exactly, and other times I’ll adapt them or write my own,” said Neff. “It all depends.”

No matter what the story or poem, however, writing for the stage helps to fulfill the love in her musician’s heart.

“I love to collaborate with people,” said Neff. “There’s a creative synergy that happens when you work with other artists. Everyone you talk to, from the actors to the set people, gives you a different feel on what you’re writing.”