The workers putting the finishing touches this morning on the University of Maine’s new academic performing arts hall are helping to bring together more than just a structure. The building will gather the campus-wide diaspora of UMaine’s performing arts community under a single roof, and tonight will contain a celebration for the fund-raisers, planners, faculty and students who brought the building to life.

The Class of 1944 Hall, as the building of the School of Performing Arts is called, is a magnificent combination of performance space, technical wizardry, cleanly lighted practice rooms, an impressive recital hall and hallways that are a visual and textural delight. After years of planning and fund-raising, the university community should be excited by this addition at UMaine.

Until now, performing arts programs have been scattered throughout the campus. Music was located in Lord Hall; theater in Alumni Hall; dance at Lengyel gym; faculty, all over. Bringing together the disciplines will give focus to the school and attract students to the state-of-the-art facility. The 50,000-square-foot building will be used by a score of university orchestras, jazz ensembles, dance companies, chorales and theater groups in addition to the 1,500 students who are enrolled in performing arts courses. Other students also should be interested in, for instance, the computer-imaging resources in the hall’s multi-media lab.

The Class of 1944 Hall cost $6.2 million to complete, which includes a gift of more than $1 million from the class for which it is named. The students in the Class of 1944, in fact, were a bit like the university’s performing arts community. Scattered — in their case, by war — most of them were graduated with classes of the late ’40s. They have been brought together, however, by this project and their own generous spirit. Large donations also came from the public (through a $1.8 million bond issue in 1988), from members of the President’s Council for University Development and from a Kresge Foundation grant.

The program at the hall tonight calls for dance, theater and musical performances throughout the building. It promises to be a festive tune-up to many years of terrific performances.