There will be more to the Feb. 23 USC Thornton Chamber Orchestra concert at Bovard Auditorium than meets the ear.

Listeners will hear a swarm of music styles, with pieces that span the Baroque era to the present, representing French, Italian, Swedish and Austrian composers.

But the significance of the concert goes beyond the performance to what these carefully chosen pieces represent – harbingers of a new, evolving approach to orchestral studies in the USC Thornton School of Music.

USC Thornton professor Larry Livingston, who selected the pieces and will be conducting, has been named music director of the USC Thornton Orchestral Program and given responsibility for providing the artistic vision for the redesigned program.

“We want to create a crucible of experiences that will mirror and anticipate the realities of life in the profession,” Livingston said.

USC Thornton Dean Robert Cutietta announced the new direction last month, saying he wanted to craft “a more coherent and focused orchestral training program."

Livingston, who is meeting weekly with a faculty committee that is designing the new program, wants to increase the variety of musical skills taught, maximizing the possibility that students will have professional careers.

One innovation under consideration is to experiment with the ratio of rehearsals to performances. Students in university music schools and conservatories typically rehearse seven to eight times to play one concert. In professional life, however, musicians rehearse a few times and then play many concerts.

Livingston said there is no question that student musicians benefit from having sufficient rehearsal time. However, they also need to develop a much steeper learning curve. So they may be asked to perform concerts with bare-bones rehearsal schedules.

Another real-life experience is to have students learn to play with a percussion “click track” running in their headphones, as is often done during recording of a film score.

The revamped program will continue to ground students in the great orchestral repertoire of the past, with attention given to authentic performance practice of historical music. But it also will expose students to new genres, including crossover works involving jazz and popular music, interfacing with technology and improvisation.

The point, Livingston said, is to make students “more enlightened, adaptive and agile.

“We are not turning the ship completely around,” he emphasized. “We already have a wonderful orchestra program in the school, with interesting, diverse repertoire and a variety of stellar conductors.”

The intent is to retain the core elements of the structure and integrate the new with the old, he said.

Livingston said he chose the pieces for the Feb. 23 concert, which begins at 7:30 p.m., as “a microcosm of where we may be headed with the new program.”

One piece will be an Italian Baroque offering of a concerto grosso by Arcangelo Corelli, played on modern instruments but utilizing instrumental techniques characteristic of the late 17th century. Mozart’s Symphony No. 34, written 100 years later, will represent the late 18th century.

French composer Darius Milhaud’s “The Creation of the World,” which Livingston described as “French perfume meets Cotton Club jazz,” is a snapshot of the 1920s.

The fourth piece by Swedish composer Lars-Erik Larsson dates to the 1950s. Student trombonist Christian Goldsmith, the winner of last spring’s concerto competition in the wind and brass division, will be the featured soloist.