Fairchild Tropical Botanic Garden, one of the treasures of South Florida, is also the setting for one of the area’s most intriguing musical events.

Now in its third year, Fairchild’s GardenMusic Festival, a 2012 Knight Arts Challenge winner, offers chamber music—with a twist.

The festival, which runs Jan. 9 through 18, includes four concerts with a distinct theme. Overall, they showcase a range of musical styles, from chamber and folk music to jazz and Latin music. The program also includes two children’s concerts Jan. 10 and 17.

The Sixth Floor Trio developed and directs the festival, which began in 2012. Its members include Teddy Abrams, a conductor, composer, clarinetist and pianist, Harrison Hollingsworth, bassoonist and violinist, and clarinetist Johnny Teyssier. Drummer and educator Gabriel Globus-Hoenich coordinates the educational programming of the festival.

Founded in 2008, the trio has challenged chamber music conventions by exploring everything from Klezmer and bluegrass music to Baroque, featuring both original arrangements and improvisation. The trio received Knight support in 2011 to perform Random Acts of Culture in four Knight communities.

“Fairchild is such a beautiful place and I always thought it would be a perfect place to listen to music,” said Jennifer Stearns Buttrick, a vice president of the board of trustees at Fairchild and an early proponent of the festival. Buttrick became acquainted with Abrams during his time as Conducting Fellow and assistant conductor at New World Symphony (from 2008 to 2011) and saw “a perfect opportunity to bring him on board and create a music festival.

“People who came to the garden could listen to the rehearsals,” she said. “The kids going through the garden for their Discovery Program would be introduced to [classical] music and there would be opportunities for our educational programming.”

The confluence of approaches and interests have resulted in a festival with an adventurous sensibility, but also with an eye on accessibility and reaching new audiences.

“I feel very strongly that the styles in music are artificial boundaries, especially in the classical music world in which so much of it is geared to a very specific kind of audience, a very specific kind of environment,” said Abrams, who is also music director of the Louisville Orchestra.

“We are all about breaking down those barriers and demonstrating that the music we play is universal and highly compatible with musical styles from around the world. [We] deliberately choose musicians who have flexibility, who play in other styles and want to share those other styles. ”

The programming also enlists other forms of art—and types of artists—to break down preconceptions about classical music and the concert experience. The most telling collaboration has been with visual artist Agustina Wodgate, who returns to the GardenMusic Festival this year.  “She’s one of my favorite Miami artists,” says Abrams.

“Agustina is doing some wild stuff right now about rethinking how people actually interact with concerts,” he says. “She’s absolutely brilliant. Last year she installed cameras [on] the musicians’ heads and we projected those [images] so people could see what the musicians were seeing. It was such a cool collaboration.”

This year Wodgate’s plans include audience participation, leading garden tours and better incorporating the festival tents into the garden setting, Abrams says.

The entire experience immerses the audiences in a novel celebration of music and nature.

Buttrick, a classical music fan, says that over the years she has heard from many people “who say they don’t understand [classical music] or have never been exposed to it. Some people may not go to the Arsht Center or may not go to the New World Center  — but they may bring their kids to the garden, sit on a blanket and listen to this music and realize that ‘You know what? I like this music.’ And this is an opportunity to not only introduce many people to classical music, but also to show that classical music has a connection with many forms of music that they may already know and enjoy like jazz or Latin music.”

For Abrams, blurring the lines between classical and popular music is not just a way to reach a broader audience; it’s also “historically accurate.”

Such a setting, he says, “much more resembles the world that Beethoven and Mozart and Mahler and Bach lived in, when there was fluidity between what was popular and what was composed and written down on paper, what was improvised and what wasn’t. Everybody did everything.”

The programming of the GardenMusic Festival emphasizes that approach.

The opening concert showcases “the musicians in some kind of solo capacity or [gives] them a chance to show off what is unique about them and their personality,” Abrams says. “It’s a great opportunity to share what everybody brings to the table.”

That concert, on Friday, Jan. 9, at 7 p.m., features singer Aoife O’Donovan, who Abrams describes as “one of my favorite artists in the whole musical world right now,” and violinist Jeremy Kittel, who appeared at the festival last year.

The other concerts feature themes of spirituality and “our relationship with nature,”  (“The Sacred, Profane, and Spiritual,” on Sunday, Jan. 11); musical experimentation, on Saturday, Jan. 17 (“We pick pieces that in some way push a barrier or try something new or make us question our assumptions about the music,” explains Abrams); and “A Gozar! Grooves in the Garden,” a collaboration with the classically trained, three-time Grammy nominated Cuban music group Tiempo Libre, Sunday, Jan. 18. 

The closing evening might very well synthesize the overall concept of the program.

“This will be a great opportunity to show the symbiosis between different musical worlds,” explains Abrams. “Tiempo Libre arranges classical pieces but plays them in their style, and we are writing pieces for this collaboration. I think it’s a great way of celebrating the blending of great music.”

Fernando González is a Miami-based arts and culture writer.

For more information on Fairchild’s GardenMusic Festival, visit fairchildgarden.org.