Melodic dubstep fans might seem unlikely to be in the audience of a string quartet concert, but they regularly fill the venues of genre-bending ensemble ATLYS’s concerts – even when the group is performing works from their recently-released neo-Romantic album the “Sonnenberg Suite.”
Violinists Sabrina Tabby and Jinty McTavish, violist Rita Andrade and cellist Genevieve Tabby formed ATLYS in 2016. The ensemble is completely self-managed and self-directed, and it is on a mission to make the often inscrutable — or seemingly archaic — world of classical music broadly accessible.
ATLYS’s classically trained members apply a high level of virtuosity to more traditional chamber fare as well as its ambitious arrangements of tunes infused in our day-to-day lives.
“ATLYS is about being inspired by our actual surroundings, this beautiful, diverse world, and allowing that to seep into classical music traditions,” Sabrina said.
A long-standing partnership with prominent EDM artist Seven Lions exemplifies ATLYS’s commitment to transcending genre boundaries. In 2021, Seven Lions’s management reached out to ATLYS about joining the artist onstage to play an acoustic string quartet rendering of his music. Ari Fisher, ATLYS’s composer and an IU Jacobs School of Music alumnus, got to work on these meticulously constructed arrangements.
“Ari did such an incredible job of distilling the emotional content and pulling that out with strings while adding the virtuosic flair that other composers might be afraid of writing,” Sabrina said.
Composing fearlessly is one of Fisher’s priorities.
“I’m all about high risk, high reward,” Fisher said.
ATLYS first brought Fisher’s bold arrangements of Seven Lions’s music to the stage at Denver’s Red Rocks Amphitheater not long after the two artists initially connected. This year, the ensemble returned to that same venue to open for Seven Lions to a crowd of 10,000 people.
The recent concert was not the only artistic milestone for ATLYS in 2024. On Nov. 15, the quartet released an album recording of them performing Fisher’s composition the “Sonnenberg Suite,” a 10-movement neo-Romantic piece inspired by the Sonnenberg Gardens in Canandaigua, New York. Each movement is dedicated to a particular themed section of the garden, evoking varied scenes and moods, while the piece as a whole aims for aesthetic and emotional cohesion.
“The suite is written in a way that anyone can connect to,” McTavish, another Jacobs School of Music alumna who first crossed paths with Fisher when the pair were freshmen at IU, said. “It’s coming back to what our audiences are here to do: they’re here to feel something. We’re trying to bring things back to that.”
The Sonnenberg Gardens, originally designed and built by the lady of the Sonnenberg Mansion over the first two decades of the 20th century following her husband’s death, are a tapestry of love and loss, lending themselves to emotional storytelling that can reach all audiences.
By carefully considering audiences’ backgrounds and responses to their music, and the tastes of modern audiences, ATLYS creates a dynamic artistic identity that transcends rigidity in listening.
“My upbringing was all about classical music, but in some not-so-traditional ways, like cartoons and Disney,” Fisher said. “For me to understand this classical music through film and pop, I feel like I have this appreciation for introducing people through this music by whatever means necessary.”
The ensemble hopes that positioning diverse influences side-by-side on a concert program can help bring unlikely listeners into the classical fold just as Fisher’s childhood inspired.
“In an ATLYS show, we’ll play a few movements of ‘Sonnenberg,’ but we’ll surround it with ‘Zelda’ music, we’ll surround it with Rihanna,” McTavish said. “Those are other things that make them feel something. So, when we get to ‘Sonnenberg,’ even though it’s neo-Romantic, it fits right in, because it makes them feel something.”
ATLYS aims to derive resonant classical music from modern culture. The vitality of the genre depends on the constant stream of new muses we find by simply looking – and listening – around.
The “Sonnenberg Suite” is available to stream on all major listening platforms.
