Classical music is coming to life on the campus of Southern Connecticut State University, thanks to a new partnership developing between the university's Music Department and Orchestra New England (ONE), the New Haven-based chamber music group.

Mark Kuss, associate professor of music, and James Sinclair, ONE founder and conductor, are working together on a program that will involve a variety of interactions between the orchestra and the university, including an on-campus residency tied to SCSU music classes and live performances for students in these classes.

This fall, Sinclair will work with music students, who will also have opportunities to play with ONE. In addition to conducting, Sinclair is a scholar on the composer Charles Ives, and Kuss said he has "a great educational style."

Kuss hopes eventually to expand the program into a community outreach project that will attract local elementary and secondary school students.

As well as coordinating this partnership with ONE, Kuss has been named the orchestra's composer-in-residence, and on May 9 at Battell Chapel, the group performed a violin concerto Kuss composed for its final concert of the season. The concert, entitled "Music for the Theater," also featured movements from Aaron Copland's "Music for the Theatre" and Richard Strauss's suite for Moliere's comedy, "Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme." Kuss has previously composed works for jazz great Branford Marsalis, who came to New Haven in 2006 to work with

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students at Southern and perform a saxophone concerto with the New Haven Symphony - a concerto that Kuss composed for him and the orchestra.

Kuss is now working on a cello concerto for former student Mihai Marica, a cellist who attends the Yale School of Music. Marica will perform the concerto next spring with ONE in its final concert of that season.

"(Young people) are not opposed to classical music - they just don't have a lot of experience with it," Kuss said. "When they get to see living human beings make music with conviction, their sense of the music is completely changes."

Kuss said that in his experience, students' reactions to seeing and hearing a live orchestra perform is "like that of seeing a Nine Inch Nails concert," referring to the popular rock music act. The immediacy of the music, and the experience of "seeing 50 people focused and making this amazing sound," really touches students, he said.

The opportunity to have this kind of experience on campus will soon be much more commonplace. The Hamden Symphony Orchestra, of which Kuss is a board member, rehearsed at SCSU this year and worked with students. William Boughton, music director of the New Haven Symphony, recently taught a class on campus, and Kuss would like to build on the university's relationship with NHSO.