If there is a time to get New Yorkers interested in Lukas Foss and new classical music, this is it.

One of his lesser known, more challenging pieces, “The Prairie,” will be performed in New York for the first time in 30 years — in time to celebrate the 85th birthday of this versatile composer, pianist, conductor, and academic.

“The Prairie,” a cantata based on a poem by Carl Sandburg about the settling of the American West, will be performed by the Choral Society of the Hamptons, the Greenwich Village Singers, and the Brooklyn Philharmonic on June 28 at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Rose Theater, as well as on July 7 at the Channing Sculpture Garden in Bridgehampton.

“He writes with such unique and imaginative compositional powers,” a soloist in this celebration of Mr. Foss’s career, Carol Wincenc, said. “He loves to call himself l’enfant terrible.”

Another piece by Mr. Foss and selections from Aaron Copland’s “Old American Songs” will round out the bill, but “The Prairie” is undoubtedly the centerpiece of the program. “It’s the one that made me well-known when I was very young,” Mr. Foss said. “I’m looking forward to it.”

The performance was organized by the Prairie Project, a group put together by the Choral Society of the Hamptons and Mark Mangini, the music director of the two choruses. “It was totally Mark’s idea,” a principal fund-raiser for the Prairie Project and publisher of the Easthampton Star, Helen Rattray, said. “He had been called in as a ringer when a church in Brooklyn was performing this cantata. He was quite taken with the music and wanted to do it.”

So Mr. Mangini presented a 1976 recording of “The Prairie” to a group of philanthropic music lovers, several fund-raising events followed, and the Prairie Project came into being. Its first main challenge was to defray the cost of the two performances.

“We say it’s $157,000, but it may wind up being more,” Ms. Rattray said. She and her husband, Christopher Cory, both sing in the Choral Society of the Hamptons. Ms. Rattray organized benefits and edited program notes in between rehearsals, leaving Mr. Mangini free to focus on the music making.

“It has real challenges for choral singers,” he said, as well as “technical challenges that may have scared off some conductors.”

But the production is as much about Mr. Foss himself as his music. Mr. Mangini said the point of the performance was “not just to have people say it’s a great piece, but also have people say what a great composer Lukas Foss is. He’s a composer who tried a lot of different things and is difficult to pigeonhole.”

Solidifying Mr. Foss’s place among New York composers is a goal of Ms. Rattray’s. “We’ve invited a lot of musician friends who are friends of ours and Lukas’s. We’ve also sent letters to 80 conductors in the area inviting them to come but also suggesting that they perform ‘The Prairie.'”

While these two performances are bound to popularize the piece among new music aficionados, the interest of the public at large is another story. “Classical music is not the cynosure of all American eyes,” Mr. Cory said.

“It’s an American moment, the rediscovering of an American masterpiece,” Ms. Rattray said.

“This is a piece with words from an American poet about the United States,” Mr. Mangini said. “It has a typically American optimism. That’s good to think about in this day and age when there isn’t a lot of that.”