On a warm summer day in San Francisco, just a few days past the summer solstice, the four members of the Del Sol String Quartet have removed their shoes, filled a bowl with blueberries, and are hunkering down in a circle to rehearse for an unusual concert the following day.

“We’ll be playing inside the International Terminal at San Francisco Airport,” says Charlton Lee, violist and founding member of the quartet created almost 17 years ago. This morning’s rehearsal is taking place at Lee’s house, part of a rotating four-days-a week rehearsal schedule that has the quartet visiting each member’s home once a week. “We did the SFO concert last year, too,” Lee continues, “part of a regular series of concerts at SFO called ‘You Are Hear.’ We did three sets in three hours. It’s fun because we end up playing for thousands of people, even if most of them only hear us for a minute or two.”

“The last time we did it we played in Terminal Three, right by the food court,” cellist Hannah Addario-Berry says. “We were amplified, so our sound carried through the terminal to several of the gates. People came by and told us they’d been listening from their gate, and had been really enjoying it.” he adventurous Del Sols are no strangers to performing in unusual spaces. The quartet has performed everywhere from coffee shops to living rooms to airborne airplanes to grassy mountainsides—and even the occasional concert hall. A few days before this interview, they participated in the Garden of Memory event, an annual gathering in which dozens of musicians perform throughout the ornate columbarium and mausoleum at Oakland’s Chapel of the Chimes. Known for its devotion to new music, much of it commissioned by the quartet, the Del Sol Quartet operates under the assumption that the more the ensemble lands in unexpected situations—especially places where people can accidentally stumble upon them—the better.

“It’s basically just an interesting and entertaining way to expose more people to what we do,” violinist Rick Shinozaki says. “People learn about us and are exposed to the repertoire—and at the SFO shows, we just happen to end up selling a lot of CDs, so it’s a win-win thing.”

Live music, the quartet has discovered, is not something everyone is accustomed to or familiar with. “The other day,” Shinozaki says, “we played for a bunch of school teachers in San Jose, and [he turns to face the other players], and am I wrong or did some of the teachers there say they’d never heard live music before? Not just classical music, but any music. They’d never heard live music until they heard us. That’s sad. It’s insane.

“And these are school teachers.”

“This is why it’s incredibly important for us, as musicians,” Addario-Berry says, “to keep taking our music into places where people aren’t expecting to hear music, places where they just happen upon it and experience it, maybe for the first time ever.”

“Our expertise is playing in weird places,” Shinozaki says, laughing.

“Yes,” Addario-Berry says. “Weird music in weird places—that’s us.”

Lee—the only original member—cofounded the Del Sol String Quartet in 1992 at the Banff Centre for the Arts in Canada. In recent years, he’s been joined by violinists Shinozaki and Kate Stenberg, and cellist Addario-Berry. Early on, the ensemble was offered a residency at San Francisco State University, in association with the Alexander String Quartet. As a result, whenever the Alexanders go on tour, the Del Sols take over the teaching responsibilities. It was, for Lee, a fantastic way for the quartet to become established. Since then, the group’s reputation has been built on the quartet’s musical adventurism, which ranges from its choice of contemporary material to unexpected forms of performance. Those performances have included a longtime association with the Other Minds Festival in San Francisco, and sometimes feature percussion, singing, and even the occasional choreographed dance routine. Occasionally, the quartet has paired up with troupes of dancers, who interact in surprising ways with the musicians, sometimes lifting up each quartet member and carrying them to another side of the stage—in the middle of a piece.

The Del Sol’s recordings further emphasize the quartet’s energy and commitment to experimentation. These include Tear (2002), George Antheil: The Complete Works for String Quartet (2005), and Ring of Fire (2008).

“We’ve always had an interest in new music,” Lee says, “though for the first several years we did include the classics in our repertoire. For the last ten years or so, though, new music has become the primary mission of the Del Sol Quartet.”

“We like to think we are pushing the boundaries of what a string quartet can and will do,” Stenberg says. “In addition to collaborating with dancers, we’ve composed our own music, we’ve done improvisation, we’ve included visual art in our performances. We’ve even performed with a didgeridoo player. That was interesting.”

That latter project was String Quartet No. 16, a very political piece by Tanzanian composer Peter Sculthorpe, who was inspired by letters from Afghan refugees interned in Australia. The piece is typical of the Del Sols in that, as with the Kronos Quartet, the music makes clear the musicians’ intentions to blend their art with social messages. In recent years, the Del Sols have stepped up the effort, commissioning music that emphasizes the social and political issues the composers feel most passionate about.

“We’d like to build up a body of repertoire that is, in a sense, a way of being an activist through music,” Addario-Berry says, “presenting pieces that really delve into all sorts of humanitarian and political issues.”

“We’re very interested in educating and bringing awareness,” Stenberg adds. “I don’t know how many people even know that all these Afghan refugees are sitting out there in the desert in Australia. When we’ve played this piece, we’ve had audience members tell us they had no idea about any of that. To me, that education process is a big part of what we hope to be doing more of.”

“One way of putting it,” Shinozaki says, “is that we are excited by music that reflects our time. We like to think of our quartet as a microcosm of the world in which we live. The four of us, four very different characters, with four very different backgrounds and histories, coming together from four different directions, somehow, and creating music together. We hope that dynamic is a reflection of what is possible in the world.”

That idea—that the string quartet as a metaphor can model positive human relations—is something that the Del Sol String Quartet explored through an educational program called Peace Through Music. They’ve taken the program to elementary schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, targeting third- through fifth-graders. In the program, the members of the quartet talk about conflict resolution, essentially using the rehearsal process as an example of how to deal with things that come up when conflicts arise. The quartet hopes to bring the program back sometime soon.

“I think the Peace Through Music program will come back at some point, because it was very popular,” Stenberg says, “and it’s so close to our hearts, offering that kind of education.”

That sense of working to model peaceful collaboration also extends to the Del Sols’ relationships with composers. As often as possible, the quartet invites composers it has commissioned to attend rehearsals, and to be as involved in the development process as possible. “It’s always an honor to be able to drink directly from the source,” Shinozaki says. “It’s a special place. A collaboration with a composer is a very fertile one—the creative process is incredibly rich when you have immediate access to each other.”

Asked what kind of superhero he would be if imbued with superpowers, Shinozaki doesn’t miss a beat. “What’s interesting about this question,” he says, laughing, “is that that really is our goal, literally—to save the world. We are four very strong individual people. If we can get together, and speak as one common voice, and create great music together, over a long period of time, and never end up killing each other, what does that show to the world at large?”

“I do think we are bringing healing to the world, though I think that might sound cornier than I’d intended,” Stenberg adds. “We really do hope to heal people’s souls through music. We all need to feel that we’ve been touched by something that feels bigger than ourselves, something that seems beyond ourselves.”

“The message we have is a message of optimism,” Addario-Berry says. “A message that peace, love and creativity are not just possible—it’s our job.” “That,” Lee says, “sure sounds like a superpower to me.”

What the Del Sols Play

The members of the Del Sol String Quartet are as eclectic in their choice of instruments as they are in their selection of repertoire. First violinist Kate Stenberg plays a 1926 Antonio Sgarbi Domo with an Ole Kanestrom bow, circa 2006. Second violinist Rick Shinozaki plays an 1887 George Craske violin and a 2005 John Greenwood bow. Charlton Lee’s viola was built in 1996 by Jamie Lazzara. His bow is made by P.M. Guillaume, circa 1990. Hannah Addario-Berry plays a 1900 German cello, a copy of a 1741 Dom. Montagnana. She uses an A. Hermann bow, 1900.