Kate Steinbeck regularly introduces her clan as Asheville’s "first family of flute." That’s because the 47-year-old classical musician has been playing flute since middle school, and her husband Chris Abell makes his living crafting modern black flutes out of African grenadilla wood (and selling them for around $12,000 each). Their children have musical tendencies, of course: 12-year-old Galen plays marimba and nine-year-old Charlotte (aka Lucy) sings. Their Asheville home is piled high with sheet music and a surprisingly eclectic collection of CDs. Steinbeck, a Waynesville native who got a Fulbright scholarship to study chamber music in Belgium, admits that, early on, she was inspired by Ann Wilson, the lead singer and flute player in the rock band Heart. "We listen to everything and draw from everything," she says, noting that snippets of her flute playing show up on a recent album by Secret Agent 23 Skidoo, a local hip-hop artist who specializes in children’s music. "I’m just now getting comfortable with the word ‘classical.’"

Steinbeck is artistic director of the Keowee Chamber Music Festival, which she helped found in 2001 as a way to create work for local classical musicians. She’s a regular performer in the series, which runs through the month of June, and has played concerts all around Western North Carolina—some in churches and traditional concert halls, some in more offbeat venues like art galleries, a homeless shelter, an ice cream parlor and one of Asheville’s newer brewpubs, The Wedge. Keowee performers play traditional chamber instruments like violin, viola, cello and harp. They’re best known for post-1900 classical music, but they often spice things up with Latin-American music and jazz-inspired modern tunes. Steinbeck and two cofounders—cellist Liz Austin and violist Andrew Levin—named the summer series Keowee in honor of a Cherokee settlement in Upstate South Carolina.

This November, for the second year in a row, Steinbeck and a handful of artists will put on another genre-bending performance. She’s teaming up with poet Mara Koslein, pianist Dan Weiser, cellist Franklin Keel and soprano Tena Greene for a November show called Elegy, which explores art and artists affected by the Holocaust. The quartet will perform Michael Cohen’s From the Wall, a poignant work based on words found scratched on a German cellar wall where Jews were hiding from Nazis. They’ll also play works from such composers as Michael Cohen, Kurt Weill and Paul Schoenfield. Steinbeck, who is not Jewish but whose family lived in Germany for a few years, was inspired to create Elegy after seeing an exhibit that passed through Asheville a few years ago about Anne Frank’s diary.