Starting Feb. 25, the SoBe Institute of the Arts begins its American Masterworks series, four programs that will include performances of a major modernist classic – George Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children – as well as music by Michael Colgrass and a performance in December by the fine Canadian violinist Lara St. John.

Friday’s concert at the institute on Washington Avenue in Miami Beach is a recital of songs called Beautiful Dreamers: 150 Years of American Music. Soprano Rebekah Diaz, baritone Graham Fandrei and pianist Adam Chefitz will perform music by a wide range of composers from Stephen Foster to Eve Beglarian, Richard Rodgers to Cole Porter. Also represented will be composers from the 19th century Boston tradition — Amy Beach and John Knowles Paine — as well as mavericks such as Charles Ives and Lou Harrison.

The concert begins with four duets from Broadway and opera: Bess You Is My Woman Now, from Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess; If I Loved You, from Richard Rodgers’ musical Carousel; and two from Bernstein’s musical West Side Story: Tonight and Somewhere.

Diaz’s solo set includes songs by Beach (Ah, Love But a Day), Ives (At the River and Incantation), Beglarian (My Feelings Now) and Paine (Moonlight), as well as Cole Porter’s Love for Sale and Fairy Tales, a song by SoBe Institute founder Carson Kievman.

Fandrei also will sing Ives (Memories and At Sea), along with Aaron Copland’s version of the traditional hymn At the River, Harrison’s May Rain, Richard Hundley’s Arise, My Love, and Begin the Beguine, Cole Porter’s popular song of the tropics, love lost and the dance.

The two singers also will team for Beautiful Dreamer, the classic song by Foster, a writer whose pieces have practically become folk music. The concert starts at 8 p.m., preceded at 6:30 by an Art Speaks presentation by Kievman on the topic of “words and music.”

Kievman, a veteran composer with an extensive worklist who’s just finished his Fifth Symphony, plans to present Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children on March 25-27 along with pieces by other American composers. Crumb’s 1970 piece is one of the major works of American modernist composition, based on texts by Spanish martyr-poet Federico Garcia Lorca and featuring nifty sound effects such as what happens when you sing into the strings of a piano.

From April 25 to May 18, SoBe will present Kievman’s stage adaptation of Tales of Power, based on the Michael Colgrass piano piece and the 1974 Carlos Castaneda book it references.

“There will be professional actors presented in multimedia tableaus for scenes from the book in English and Spanish, and the Colgrass will be performed on our concert grand piano by Robert Chumbley, SoBe Arts faculty and former student of Colgrass,” Kievman wrote in an e-mail message, adding that the piano is on loan from Steinway while SoBe tries to raise enough money to buy it.

Finally, in December comes the American String Festival, a five-day package of concerts, lectures and master classes. Four visiting string artists, including St. John and Anastasia Khitruk, will each give a solo concert of American music, and on the final night, the four will team as a string quartet “at a larger venue yet to be decided,” Kievman wrote.

Kievman said SoBe is talking with composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich, a Miami native and Pompano Beach winter resident, about taking part, as well as with cellist Maya Beiser.

The series should be an important one, especially because of its focus on American music. While popular American musicians have made huge cultural inroads worldwide, the same can’t be said too often of American classical composers. Here’s a good opportunity to catch up with the impressive breadth of American musical creation, and advance the cause of a plucky arts organization in South Florida.