The canonization of Mother Teresa will be celebrated in music Sunday at the University of San Diego, which is premiering an original composition inspired by her life.

“The Poorest of the Poor: Music for Mother Teresa,” is scheduled for 2 p.m. Sunday at USD’s Founders Chapel in Founders Hall. A suggested donations of $10 will go to Missionaries of Charity, which was Mother Teresa’s order.

Father Belisario Gonzalez Aguilar, a member of the Missionaries of Charity, is scheduled to speak about Saint Teresa during the performance. Originally from Costa Rico, Gonzalez Aguilar now serves in Tijuana.

USD music professor Jeffery Malecki said the performance came together from a discussion he had with friend and colleague Tom Bough, who composed the piece.

“He approached me to ask if there were any interest in doing music on her canonization,” Malecki said. “The event itself has turned into something much more evolved.”

Bough, whom Malecki describes as musical and spiritual, is a band director at the University of Illinois and was in San Diego in April for a USD event focused on his instrument, the tuba.

They both agreed the music should depict the vibrant personality of Mother Teresa, who was awarded the 1979 Noble Peace Prize for her work with the poor.

“There’s a lot of slow pieces for dead people out there, and I didn’t want that,” Malecki said. “As we look at her life, she was certainly very vivacious.”

The six-minute piece is in two sections, with the first section influenced from Eastern Europe dance music.

“I tell my students that even a saint has a childhood,” Malecki said about the first section, which he described as childlike and playful.

The section section uses Indian scales and harmony to reflect Mother Teresa’s work in Kolkata, formerly Calcutta. The music will be performed by the USD Wind Ensemble conducted by Malecki and the USD Choral Scholars conducted by Emilie Amrein.

Bough, who began working on the piece in April in preparation for Pope Francis’ declaration of Mother Teresa’s sainthood on Sept. 4, is scheduled to be at the performance to talk about the inspiration for the piece.

“It’s exciting that we get to do a world premiere like this in the band’s infancy,” said Malecki, who came to the school last year to start its first formal band and create a music-education program. “It’s a pretty exciting time at USD for music.”

Malecki submitted a plan to create the first music-education degree at USD last week and is awaiting its final approval.

The Sunday program is expected to be about an hour and 15 minutes, beginning with “Intrada” from Claudio Monteverdi’s “Vespers” and also featuring Anton Bruckner’s “Ave Maria” and Rene Clausen’s “Prayer.”

Also during the program, USD chemistry professor James Bolender is scheduled to speak about water and poverty.

Mother Teresa visited San Diego in 1960 and returned in 1988, when she received an honorary doctorate in humane letters at USD before a large crowd in Torero Stadium. She also visited Tijuana and a school in Golden Hill during the trip.

Tijuana is the home base for Missionary of Charity Fathers, a religious community of priests founded by Mother Teresa with Fr. Joseph Langford.

Missionary sisters in the area operate a day-care center for the children of single working mothers, a home for terminally ill patients, a soup kitchen and homeless shelter.

The superior general of the 36-member religious community, Fr. Brian Kolodiejchuk, made the case for her canonization assisted by three nuns assigned to help sift through Mother Teresa’s writings and testimony of her work.

In another regional connection, Mother Teresa was treated for congestive heart failure at Scripps Clinic in La Jolla, where she received cardiac catheterization and angioplasty in 1991.

For more information on the program, visit https://www.sandiego.edu/cctc/events/mother-teresa.php.

gary.warth@sduniontribune.com