One of the most spectacular benefits of the Music Academy of the West’s new partnership (for want of a better word) with the New York Philharmonic is the dizzy-making promise of regular summer concerts in Santa Barbara by that fabled ensemble.

The first concert — to be conducted by New York Philharmonic music director Alan Gilbert — will take place at 7 p.m. Monday at the Santa Barbara Bowl.

To make things well-nigh irresistible, virtually every one of the bowl’s 4,000 seats has been classified “community access” seating, and will cost concert-goers either $10 or — if the patron is between 7 and 17 years of age — nothing at all.

As befits a warm summer evening, the program is all-American, light and familiar. We’ll revisit Samuel Barber’s Overture to “The School for Scandal,” Opus 5 (1931); Aaron Copland’s “Appalachian Spring” Suite (1944); Leroy Anderson’s Fiddle-Faddle (1947); Richard Rodgers’ “Carousel Waltz” from the Rodgers and Hammerstein musical, Carousel (1945); Leonard Bernstein’s Suite from West Side Story (1957), with soprano Julia Bullock and tenor Ben Bliss (Music Academy, 2012); and George Gershwin’s Lullaby (1919).

This is not a program that needs a whole lot of introduction. The Gershwin piece is a sweet goodnight kiss written for string quartet at the behest of his music theory teacher when he was 21. Of the “serious” works, the Barber is the best — so beautiful and stirring that one easily overlooks how fresh and original it is (Barber, too, was 21 when he wrote it, and a student at Curtis).

The Copland is a lovely, well-made piece, but everything memorable about it — “Simple Gifts” especially — was composed by someone else, before he was born.

Copland did not invent Americana, by the way. George Whitefield Chadwick laid down a definite “American” vibe in his 2nd String Quartet of 1896, but the real father of the American sound was Virgil Thomson, whose Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1930) inspired just about every Western movie sound track you can think of.

As noted previously, tickets to the New York Philharmonic concert are either $10 or free. For tickets and other information, call 805.969.8787.

— Gerald Carpenter covers the arts as a Noozhawk contributing writer. He can be reached at gerald.carpenter@gmail.com. The opinions expressed are his own.