The University of Michigan’s Life Sciences Orchestra is writing a prescription for music to start off the new year.

The LSO, composed of amateur musicians who are also faculty, staff, students and alumni from the U-M health and medical community, kicks off 2010 with a Jan. 10 (Sunday) Hill Auditorium concert largely devoted to American music.

The group, in its 10th season, is led by Robert Boardman, a doctoral candidate in conducting at the U-M School of Music and husband to a physician’s assistant in the U-M Health System.

The 4 p.m. concert is free and requires no tickets.

Featured is a trio of songs by prominent U-M alumnus and donor Bill Brehm. Fittingly, two are about the university, and the U-M Arts Chorale, a U-M student choir directed by Mark Marotto, joins the LSO to perform them in arrangements for chorus and orchestra.

Looking back to American music of an earlier era, the orchestra offers Copland’s always stirring “Fanfare for the Common Man,” and a movement of Ives Symphony No. 4 that features the LSO strings. LSO Assistant Conductor Avlana Eisenberg takes over for a work that looks at African-American and Native American music through European eyes, Dvorak’s “American Suite,” from 1895.

The ambitious program concludes with the first movement (“Totenfeier”) of Mahler’s “Ressurection’ Symphony No. 2 and a contemporary work, “Rainbow Body,” by Christopher Theofanidis. Based partly on a medieval religious chant by German female mystic Hildegard von Bingen, the piece also invokes the Buddhist idea that an enlightened being is, upon dying, absorbed into the universe as energy and light — a rainbow body.

The work has become the most-played orchestral piece by a living composer today:

For more information on the concert or the LSO, visit www.umich.edu/~lsorch, send e-mail to orchestra@umich.edu, or call 734-936-ARTS.

Watch a video about the Life Sciences Orchestra, created as a preview to last year's January concert: