Tony Boutté.

Two things will come together over the next couple months in the debut of a new concert series in Miami: art song and contemporary American music.

Make that three things: also, cats.

The companion animals whose video antics occupy a sizable chunk of the Internet also will be celebrated in the series, which wraps with the results of a composition competition featuring new songs about our feline friends.

On January 19th, University of Miami voice professor Tony Boutté presents the first concert in his New American Voices series, which will begin in New York City before coming back to Miami, and afterward will be presented in both metropolises. The concerts will feature works by American composers Michael Alec Rose this month, Zachary Wadsworth in February, and in March, music by student, alumni and faculty composers at UM.

An important goal of these recitals is to advance the cause of new American music.

“It’s a little bit like orchestras not performing newer works, afraid that audiences won’t get them or won’t be approachable. What I’ve found from all my work with modern composers, from the early 1980s until now, is that composers are writing really beautiful, accessible music on fabulous poetry,” said Boutté, a tenor. “And I just feel like there’s such a marriage of word and music that people need to hear.”

Michael Alec Rose.

The January 19th concert, scheduled for the National Opera Center Recital Hall in New York, is devoted to the music of Rose, an associate professor of composition at Vanderbilt University, and features four song cycles written for Boutté and pianist Margaret Kampmeier, including a new cycle called Silence, a work by a self-published British poet about a woman who decides to not speak for an entire year.

“He writes beautiful music, but it’s also really complex. In a way, it’s like a rich, rich text,” Boutte said. “It sort of washes over you and you don’t get it the first time, but the more I know it, the more it reveals itself. It’s like a good poem.”

The second program, set for Feb. 20 at UM’s Clarke Recital Hall and Feb. 23 at the National Opera Center, is devoted to the music of Wadsworth, an American composer now based in Canada, where he has taught at the University of Calgary. Boutté will sing a world premiere, “What to Do When Lost in the Woods,” based on a 1902 text from Ladies’ Home Journal, and UM violinist Scott Flavin and clarinetist Margaret Donaghue Flavin will be on hand for some of Wadsworth’s chamber music.

Zachary Wadsworth. Photo by Dallas Southcott

“I think his music is so beautiful and so charming, and it mirrors him as a person,” said Boutté, who first encountered Wadsworth’s work when he sang in a performance of his chamber opera, Venus and Adonis. “He’s also a big fan of Benjamin Britten, which is another reason I’m drawn to Zach’s music. You can hear his love for Britten’s music in his music.”

The final New American Voices concerts, planned for March 5 at UM’s Gusman Hall and March 9 at the National Opera Center, are devoted to work from UM’s Frost School of Music. Boutté will joined by UM opera director Alan Johnson at the piano and UM soprano Esther Hardenbergh, as well as UM alumna Alissa Roca, a soprano who sang the title role in the school’s production of Michael Daugherty’s opera Jackie O last year.

The event will also mark the announcement of the student winner of the New American Voices Composition Prize, in which young composers were invited to set six poems Boutté has written in honor of the various cats that have been in his life. The cycle, called Your Humble Servant, is a tribute to felines past and present named Tiger, Morris, Sport, Missy, Makin and Fritz.

“I had a good amount of students doing that, and I chose a winner. But I’ll be doing all of the songs that they wrote,” he said.

In addition, the program will include songs by Douglas Cuomo, a UM alum noted for his television work including scores for Homicide: Life on the Street, and the theme for Sex and the City, and three songs on poems by Emily Dickinson written by UM vocal performance lecturer Coreen Duffy.

Hardenbergh also will perform songs by Robert Heath, a founder of the Miami Bach Society and veteran church organist who died in October at 55. “That will be a tribute to him and his music,” Boutté said.

The March concerts are a “culmination” of what Boutté would like the New American Voices series to be about, he said.

“Eventually, I want this to continue, and I will participate on concerts, but I will be more of a curator, and an introducer of singers to composers and texts. My idea is that this is not a showcase for me; it’s a way to promote this kind of collaboration,” Boutté said.

Boutte said after this initial season, he should have enough material to be able to write grant applications and be able to pay his participants, almost all of whom are volunteering their services this time around. “A lot of people have done this for the same reason I doing it. They see it as an opportunity to do something creative and new and exciting,” he said.

The concerts are free admission, and the UM events will be livestreamed, though that as yet isn’t the case for the New York recitals. More information is available through the New American Voices Facebook page at www.facebook.com/NAV2015.

American art song has a rich tradition, and Boutte’s series is an effort to add to it.

“I love (Samuel) Barber, I love (Ned) Rorem, and I especially some of the newer composers like Ricky Gordon, and Jake Heggie, and John Musto, and Libby Larsen — all of them. At some point, those people were championed by somebody like me who wanted to sing their music, or maybe the composer wrote the music and championed the singer. But there was some collaboration that happened.

“That’s what I’m excited about presenting here, not only fostering my collaboration with composers, but encouraging pianists, singers and composers to do it together,” he said.