When Yanni came to The Bryce Jordan Center last month his show was heavily advertised around campus.

"In the posters, it proclaimed Yanni as the 'new sound of classical music,' " said Adam Ragusea (junior-music composition).

However, current music students have a different definition of what the new classics really are.

"Yanni is not the new sound of classical music," Ragusea said.

This new sound of classical music, Ragusea said, is Musica Nova and will be performed at 8 p.m. tomorrow at Esber Recital Hall in Music Building I.

Musica Nova, which is Latin for "new music," is made up of modern compositions written and performed by students.

It is a performance of works that students typically wouldn't be able to play in a normal recital, said Beth Golden (senior-performance music).

The School of Music has two of these performances each semester. The last performance was in February.

"In February, pieces of original composition by students as well as pieces by composers from around the world were played," said Peter Buck (graduate-music composition), who is a performer in Musica Nova as well as a teaching assistant for composition.

But this performance of Musica Nova is different from the last show.

This time around, Musica Nova has a lot of flute, percussion and string accompaniment and has been composed entirely by students. It is made up of 11 different pieces written by students, and is performed almost entirely by students, Buck said.

"Performers are collaborating together, writing pieces for each other and performing together," he said.

Buck, whose piece is titled "...That go so Far," was inspired by a poem by Robert Bly. Buck will be playing percussion in his own work, and will be accompanied by flute, percussion, violin, viola and cello throughout the piece.

Buck's composition was actually written for flutist Golden, who needed a theme for her honors thesis. Golden wanted to do a recital with works by Penn State students for her honors thesis, so many of her musical colleagues wrote compositions for her. In total, four pieces were written for her, and three are being performed in Musica Nova.

"The problem with art and music is that a lot of people see it as something that happened hundreds of years ago," Golden said. But this recital shows that a person can be creative today as well as be happy, and make a living doing it, she said.

"Jiahu," written by Ragusea, is one piece that was dedicated to Golden's honors thesis.

This quintet is made up of flute, guitar, cello, marimba, and percussion, with Ragusea playing guitar. Ragusea, who is a pianist, needed a guitar in his composition, and even though he said he is not really trained in the instrument, he is playing it.

"My desire to use a guitar in the piece was less about referencing rock music, but more about using different tunings to emulate the sound of a Middle Eastern long-necked lute," Ragusea said.

He wrote the composition after reading an article in the journal Nature about a set of flutes excavated from the early Neolithic archeological site of Jiahu, in Henan Province, China, he said.

The flutes, which are nearly 9,000 years old, are among the oldest recovered multi-note musical instruments and the article documented an acoustical analysis of the best preserved flute which is still entirely playable, he said. Ragusea took the pitches of this ancient flute and made them fundamental to human pitch perception, thus creating his own composition, which took him about a semester to write.

"It is a really good piece, it's creative, and it's really, really hard," Golden said. "He put a lot of time into it."