It was a Monday afternoon in early March as students filed into Tracey Collins’ sun-filled music classroom at the FAIR School in downtown Minneapolis. Cardboard music notes stapled to the ceiling rotated ever so slightly. A turquoise drum kit sat gleaming in the corner.

Something was a little different, though. Four strangers holding string instruments were setting up on a small set of risers.

With little introduction, they launched into Argentine tango master Astor Piazzolla’s “Fuga y Misterio,” a fast-tempo piece with scratchy sounds created by using bows below the instruments’ bridges.

FAIR was one of many schools that the quartet — all members of the Sphinx Virtuosi, a professional chamber music ensemble based in Detroit — visited while touring the country since February.

Making classical music seem cool to teenagers is no simple task. One of the 20 or so students sat with his arms crossed for most of the performance, but perked up when violinist Clayton Penrose-Whitmore revealed he had made beats for rapper Fetty Wap.

“What song was it?” the student asked. “I’ve got to listen to that.”

Educational outreach is a core part of the Sphinx musicians’ job descriptions. Made up of top young black and Latinx classical soloists, the group has served as a model for diversity. Founded in 1997 by Aaron Dworkin, a violinist and longtime educator at the University of Michigan, it has evolved from its beginnings as a young artists competition to a multifaceted organization.

By the time the quartet played the first movement from Schubert’s famous “Death and the Maiden” — a piece both eerie and dramatic — the FAIR School class was giving their full attention to the performers, who communicated with sharp eye contact and played with intensity, despite having performed the piece hundreds of times in rehearsal and in concert halls across the country.

From the final note of the piece, the students were bubbling with questions.

How do you start playing at the same time? How do you know how to use a bow, and, like, not poke someone’s eye out? How do you practice if you live in an apartment? How does the way you move your hand affect the way your instrument sounds?

The last question came from 16-year-old Robbie Scott, a junior at the FAIR School, who plays drums, clarinet and saxophone, but is enamored of the idea of taking up cello. She piped up regularly with detailed questions during the Q&A.