Melissa Fathman had a question she couldn't answer. She's education director of the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, a lofty classical group, and she wondered how she could bring chamber music to teenagers. But then she had a light-bulb moment, one that just might help to change classical music forever. "Why do this thinking alone?" she wondered. "I'll ask some teens myself."
So she asked community music schools in New York to recommend some teenage students. When she met with them, she posed the toughest question she could. "Give it to me straight," she said. "Is chamber music dead?" No, said the teens, but kids feel excluded, because the Chamber Music Society (like the rest of the classical music world) feels boring and elderly.

"So why don't we put on a concert that appeals to you and your friends?" Ms. Fathman asked. And that's how she formed her Student Advisory Committee, which decided that the concert should feature music written right now. Ms. Fathman offered them performers who'd do that, and from her list they chose Ethel, a string quartet famous in New York for adventure, precision and drop-dead excitement. ("We didn't want to sound like a string quartet," says Mary Rowell, one of the group's violinists, explaining the name.)
The kids met with Ethel and helped pick the music for a May 9 concert. Ms. Fathman told them they'd have to produce the event, though of course with professional help; they'd even have to market the tickets.

But here they got lucky. On tour in early May was a 45-member choir from George Washington Carver High School in Montgomery, Ala. These tours are annual events, and each year Carlea Scruggs -- a friendly, energetic, federal programs assistant at Carver -- finds the singers "an experience they haven't had." On the Web she discovered the Ethel performance, and bought tickets for her group.
Which gave the student marketers a boost, and -- when I showed up on May 9 at the Rose Studio, an informal rehearsal space where the concert was held -- provided something I've never seen at a Lincoln Center classical event: an audience more than half African-American.

Max Feldman, a senior at New York's Trinity School and a violinist, introduced the evening. "People," he said, "think chamber music is expensive and boring -- which it often is!" But Ethel, he said, is "the most bad-ass quartet around." And as if to prove it, the group began with a piece by John King, "Shuffle," which had a heavy blues vibe. That, as I later heard from Ted Feldman, Max's brother and a sophomore at Trinity, was the kind of music the student advisers were looking for: "We wanted what would be best accepted by kids." But, as Ted Feldman added, they also didn't want music that was too obviously pop. They'd chosen well. The King piece wasn't blues, but it played with blues, more or less the way Haydn, back in the 18th century, played with the minuet. The Alabama kids grooved to the beat.
All the pieces Ethel played -- the others, all of them strong, were by Todd Reynolds, the group's other violinist, and by Marcelo Zarvos, Phil Kline, John Zorn and Julia Wolfe -- had a taste of pop somewhere in their sound or rhythm. But none of them were smooth or slick. All were genuine chamber music, written with advanced contemporary classical techniques, which made them miles too smart and tough to be real pop -- and also too gritty and dissonant even to go down well with a normal classical audience. Which didn't stop the kids from liking everything; by the end of the evening, they were on their feet and screaming, Alabama and New York teens alike.
Ethel talked to its new audience, though at first not always comfortably. Its members apologized too much for the classical tradition I thought, and didn't explain the technical terms they used. But midway through, Todd Reynolds had an inspiration; he asked the choir to sing. Up stepped Henry Terry, their large, gentle and clearly inspired conductor, to lead them in "Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho," and the words of the song came true: Any walls between Ethel and their dual New York and Alabama audience tumbled right down to the ground.

The choir was spectacular -- its women soared, its tenors wailed on shining high notes, its basses shook the floor. In grateful tribute, Ethel improvised a response, with so much delight in careful details that I'd have sworn they'd planned the music long in advance. And then the conversation flowed, with questions from the students, and answers from Ethel, happy laughter bubbling on both sides of the exchange. That gave the ovation at the end some very special warmth.
And the meaning of the event wasn't lost on anybody. "For today's generation," said a beaming Carlea Scruggs, "they have our attention." With music, let me say again, that the standard classical audience would find too difficult -- too dissonant, too uncompromising. But it doesn't strike kids that way. For an hour or so on May 9, Ethel and the teens created a world in which classical music had never grown distant, a world in which it was as fresh and direct as crowds dancing in the street.