Sound ExChange brings its brand of music to Fringe

The buzzword "outreach" has long been synonymous with classical music organizations' efforts to be more relevant to the prospective audiences in their communities. For the Eastman-trained artists in SoundExChange — a performer/composer collective founded by the French horn player and Executive Director Emily Wozniak — "audience-centered programming" is not merely a supplementary facet of their work, but the indispensable and galvanizing force behind every concert they perform.

Now bolstered by a $100,000 grant from The Max and Marian Farash Charitable Foundation , the ensemble is poised to deepen its impact through a slew of engaging concerts, including two at the First Niagara Rochester Fringe Festival, a forthcoming yearlong residency with RocMusic (a cooperative aimed at teaching classical music to inner-city children) and more.

After a successful "O1X: Digital Intersection of Music, Art and Audience" concert at Geva Theatre Center, the group's Fringe efforts switch to the Rochester Contemporary Art Center, where they will perform "Open Circle" at 7 p.m. Wednesday and Friday among the elements of the gallery's "State of the City" exhibit.

Violinist Lili Sarayrah and composer/vocalist/ukulele player Matthew Cox sat down to answer questions about experimenting with the musician/listener paradigm. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

It seems like Sound ExChange's model is emblematic of a newer approach for independent music organizations, particularly collectives.

Sarayrah: Exactly. Even though SoundExchange has changed a lot since its impetus, it has always been (about) audience-centric programming, alternative venues and collaboration. So I guess in that way we try to update the model by making it flexible in a chamber music setting, kind of honoring all the training we've had and doing what we love in the intimate playing setting but also trying to branch out and include all of our strengths.

What has been the greatest hindrance for Sound ExChange in truly immersing the listener in the performances as opposed to having the audience merely observing it?

Cox: To me, it's more about inviting (the audience) to participate. I think that people enjoy being creative, people enjoy making music and making sounds and exploring expressivity.

How will the creative process of individual audience members inform the interpretation of the compositions and songs you'll be playing for Open Circle?

Cox: Where Geva functioned as more of a spin on the concert experience — it's in a pretty standard concert hall — (with ROCO) there is currently a found objects exhibition, and so it takes things that would be mundane otherwise and puts an artistic context to them, and then people can look at them and think about associations to certain objects. So what's cool about that is that the audience has a chance to play music with otherwise mundane found objects.

It seems like the paradigm that you're trying to go against is that the performers cast this imposing shadow over the listeners. The give-and-take was certainly apparent Saturday in composer/percussionist Kurt Fedde's piece For Melissa, during which saved voicemails from Fedde's closest friend were fully incorporated into the musical fabric, and then audience members were welcomed to play their own treasured voice messages live during the performance.

Cox: Music is fundamentally unifying, and the concert experience brings everyone together in some certain abstract way on an individual basis, but I think that to take it a step further and to create an authentic concert experience that's specific to that one show, that one time and those people — it's a beautiful, transient, temporary thing, but it's still very, very moving and powerful.

Matthew, have there been ways in which your collaboration with RIT photography professor Susan Lakin and computer science professor Joe Geigel on your original composition interscape has stretched or challenged the way in which you interact with the audience?

Cox: They have this breadth of experience in disciplines that we know nothing about. And so it's so cool to force yourself, to challenge yourself in that way to kind of pull these ideas out of you that (you) wouldn't have even known were possible.

Kushner is a Rochester-based freelance writer.