Jazz and modern composition will be the focus of the Penn State Mozart Orchestra's free concert at 8 tonight in the School of Music's Recital Hall.

"Literature for chamber orchestra was written in every century," said conductor Douglas Meyer, adding that the students in the orchestra would benefit from experiencing literature beyond Mozart and his contemporaries.

"We need to get out of playing the old music all the time," Meyer said, although the classicists are the foundation on which the orchestra rests.

So he chose composer Aaron Copland's Quiet City, selections from Billy the Kid, Prairie Night and Celebration Dance; and composer Gunther Schuller's Journey into Jazz, as well as Haydn's Symphony no. 92 in G major, the "Oxford Symphony."

"It's really an eclectic program," Meyer said, with the traditional Haydn, Copland's traditional American orchestral music and Schuller's piece combining jazz and orchestral styles.

For Schuller's piece, students from the University's top jazz ensemble, Centre Dimensions, will join the orchestra.

"I always think collaboration between two performing groups is a good idea. It lets both sides know music is music," said Dan Yoder, associate music professor and director of Centre Dimensions.

Yoder will join his students onstage for this concert, reading the narration for Journey into Jazz.

"It's a musical story about a kid who gets a trumpet, learns it in the strict classical sense, then runs into some jazz players," Yoder said. The story is similar to what many students experience in the University's jazz program, Yoder added.

"It's interesting for me to watch eyes on both sides of the stage," Meyer said of the two different performance styles, classical and jazz, working together in this piece.

Meyer chose Schuller's piece after meeting the composer at a convention in New York and decided to take a look at his composition, which has been played at the First International Jazz Festival in Washington, D.C.

"It's sort of a rare piece. This is an opportunity to hear something you might never hear again on a recording," Meyer said. So far, a recording of the piece has proven impossible to find, he added.

For its next concert, the last of the season, the orchestra will return to playing Mozart and its standard repertoire, Meyer said.