Sam Hyken. Photo by Gesi Schilling

The French pop duo known as Daft Punk almost never perform anywhere without their robot helmets, preferring to see their music as the creation of an entity outside themselves as two young European men.

But even they might be surprised to hear their music treated in an orchestral fashion, as the trumpeter, arranger and composer Sam Hyken is planning to do with his Daft Punk Suite in the first full season (in 2015-16) of the Nu Deco Ensemble, a “virtuosic and eclectic chamber orchestra designed for the 21st century.”

Hyken, principal trumpeter of the Miami Symphony and a University of Miami faculty member, and Jacomo Bairos, conductor of the Amarillo Symphony Orchestra in Texas, founded Nu Deco and plan its inaugural performance for April at The Light Box at the Goldman Warehouse in Wynwood. The ensemble is one of 75 finalists for a Knight Foundation grant to underwrite its work, and has applied for $85,000 for a two-year period, Hyken said.

“It’s more of a collective than a set ensemble, because we’re not only going to put on orchestral concerts, but we’re planning on presenting chamber music as well,” Hyken said. “While we are going to have a core group of players, the instrumentation is going to change from concert to concert, so it’s not going to be the same people every time on stage.”

Nu Deco’s model is essentially Alarm Will Sound, the New York chamber ensemble founded in 2001 by graduate students at Eastman that has made a major name for itself by performing contemporary music, commissioning new work and adapting pop music, such as songs by the British electronica icon Aphex Twin.

“Miami is in the middle of a cultural renaissance, so it’s time to bring this kind of dynamic group to Miami,” he said.

Hyken, 33, a native of New Jersey who holds degrees from Juilliard, London’s Royal Academy of Music and the University of Miami, said Nu Deco has been in the work since he dreamed it up with Bairos when both men were working in Singapore, of all places, for the island nation’s symphony orchestra.

Jacomo Bairos.

“I instantly became best friends with him; we’re very like-minded,” Hyken said. “And we would talk about where classical music was going, the crisis in classical music, and how we could present instrumental performances in new ways.”

The two began to focus on Miami, which is home territory for Bairos, and where Hyken had joined the New World Symphony. “Seeing the landscape as I was finishing up my fellowship in Miami, I thought there was a tremendous opportunity to do something. And (Bairos) being a Homestead native, it’s his hometown, and he wanted to create an ensemble himself.”

As Bairos began commissioning composers for Amarillo, and Hyken expanded his work into commercial music and began to meet popular music artists who wanted to collaborate on classical projects, “we thought we could create something special right here in town. We talked about it for years, and tried to figure out what our mission was … After development, we came up with this concept, and we’re finding that there is a lot of excitement out there for it.”

The ensemble will have a rotating membership of between 20 and 25 players, and will concentrate on works of the 20th and 21st centuries. Much of the programming will involve chamber works for smaller groups.

None of the first three regular concerts have been scheduled for dates in the 2015-16 season yet, but the programs have been chosen. Scheduled for the first concert are the Chamber Symphony of John Adams, Stravinsky’s Ragtime, Paul Dooley’s Point Blank, and the LCD Soundsystem Suite, an arrangement by Hyken of music by the now disbanded New York dance-punk group. The progressive chamber group Project Trio also will be on hand.

The second concert will contain Steve Reich’s 8 Lines, Luciano Berio’s Opus Zoo for woodwind quintet, and the early 20th-century Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas’s Ocho por Radio. Hyken will contribute Portishead Suite, featuring music by the British rock band. Also on the bill for the concert will be Brooklyn hip-hopper Talib Kweli.

The third concert includes the Daft Punk Suite as well as two older works, Gabriel Fauré’s Pavane, and the Appalachian Spring suite of Aaron Copland, in its original 13-member version. Also in the spotlight will be a performance by the Philadelphia DJ King Britt.

The Light Box.

“One of the tenets of our mission is community engagement, because we want to use Nu Deco Ensemble as a vehicle to connect artists in the city to one another. We want to commission multi-disciplinary works which will encourage artists in Miami to collaborate with one another,” Hyken said. “We want to be a leader in genre-bending musical exploration, meaning that we’re planning on presenting modern genre artists in a new context, just like ‘MTV Unplugged’ took artists like Nirvana and Jay-Z and LL Cool J and presented them in a fresh and unique manner.

“We’d like to do the same thing with a chamber orchestra, putting these kinds of artists in a fresh context,” he said.

That’s part of Nu Deco’s large-tent approach to what constitutes contemporary music.

“When we say new music, we’re not just talking about modern contemporary music. One of our main goals is to bring in new audiences, and the music from the 20th century that we’re programming is music that we think will be more relatable to audiences, less that we’re championing the music, but using the music to draw in new audiences.”

Educational outreach is de rigueur for arts ensembles these days, and Nu Deco is no exception. It will have an educational workshop as a part of each concert presentation, but in addition to the usual instrumental introductions in the schools, Hyken wants to stress composition, drawing on young composers from UM, Florida International University and the New World School of the Arts to come and work with students.

“We also want to focus a good deal of our educational programming on special needs, for both children and adults, because we feel they’re underserved, not just in Miami, but nationally,” Hyken said. “And we do want to establish residencies in schools, and do mentoring.”

In the long term, Hyken hopes to do five concerts a season, and after that, monthly performances. In addition to seeking grant money and donations, Nu Deco also is considering a crowdfunding appeal via Kickstarter.

It all comes down to raising the profile of Miami (and South Florida) as an arts destination. An opinion piece this past weekend in the New York Times by Miami-born writer Pamela Druckerman was mostly down on her South Florida hometown, but she did allow some hope for the city’s “buzzing new arts scene.”

That’s a sentiment that would resonate with Hyken.

“In the visual arts world, there are such amazing things going on in Miami. And dance is really coming of age, and film, with the Miami Film Festival. There’s just so much happening,” he said. “And I feel like, musically, that while there are amazing things going on, there’s still room to really grow. And so we feel that what we’re doing is not replacing anything, but complementing the existing pillars of artistic excellence already in the community.

“There are very few ensembles that really belong to Miami, and that’s something we aim to do.”