Most people don’t see local bars as venues for classical music, but a concert series at The Drake in Amherst is helping redefine and expand where classical music belongs.

Chamber@The Drake, the venue’s classical music series, brings performers to play at the venue on Sundays at 4 p.m. a few times a season.

The point of the series is to make classical music more accessible, a large component of which is making it more affordable. Tickets to The Drake’s chamber shows are only $15 for adults in advance (or $20 at the door) and always $5 for students. The shows themselves are only an hour and they start in the afternoon, so concertgoers don’t have to worry about making a late-night show if they have work the next day. Afterward, guests can also grab a drink and chat with the artists.

Of course, there will likely always be purists who think classical music belongs only in a stately concert hall, not a local bar. Chamber series co-creator Amy Gates, who is a pianist, doesn’t disavow the concert hall experience, but she also doesn’t see it as the singular way to engage with classical music.

“That’s just not where we are anymore,” she said. “I want to open up classical music to everybody, not just to people that can only afford $500 seats at the Met.”

In fact, skeptics might miss out on the unique intimacy that a classical concert in a bar offers.

“It’s a very different visceral experience when you’re up that close to artists creating live music,” Gates said. “You hear the grip of the bow on the string or the breathing of a wind instrument. You can see the piano fingers up close, and it’s a very different experience like that. And I think that’s really valuable to people — it’s breaking that barrier.”

Edward Arron, a cellist who teaches at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has performed at The Drake twice; he and his wife, pianist Jeewon Park, kicked off the chamber series in June 2022. He, too, appreciates playing large, traditional venues — in fact, he said, “I derive much of my inspiration for the art form from those experiences” — but playing The Drake gives a performer a type of connection to the audience that a bigger space cannot.

“It’s just a magical setting,” he said. “You can feel people in the audience enjoying themselves, enjoying the setting, enjoying the intimacy of the music and connection because it’s so close, and being comfortable there.” (Plus, he pointed out, many composers originally wrote specifically for small spaces like The Drake — hence the name “chamber” music.)

Downtown Amherst Foundation Board Chair Gabrielle Gould, who was instrumental in creating The Drake and co-created the chamber series with Gates, wanted to establish a local music venue that would have “a real arts and cultural impact, but also an economic impact” on the downtown area when she opened the space in the spring of 2022. Though she helped design it to accommodate performers of all genres, there’s a particular draw for classical musicians: a Steinway grand piano, a donation from Amherst College.

Since the series started, Gould said, the turnout is now three or four times its original size. The audiences still skew older — common for classical music in any case, but especially so in a town with a sizable number of seniors — but about 30% of those audiences are students, many of whom come to watch their professors perform.

“Once students come into our space,” said Gould, “they get it in their blood, and they come back.”

Of course, you don’t have to be a student of classical music — or any other kind of aficionado of the genre — to attend. Someone who didn’t grow up going to classical concerts might find Lincoln Center or the Metropolitan Opera intimidating, Gould pointed out, but there are “very few people who would not feel comfortable taking a seat at The Drake for any genre of music.”

At a chamber show, Gates added, “Maybe I reach that person that’s never understood or thought they couldn’t even understand classical music, and they come and they hear some piece that touches them deeply.”

“That’s profound to me. That’s everything.”

Tickets to Chamber@The Drake shows are available at the door or via thedrakeamherst.org/events. The next chamber show, featuring cellist Matt Haimovitz, will be on Sunday, Feb. 2. For more information about Chamber@The Drake, email chamberatthedrake@gmail.com.

Carolyn Brown can be reached at cbrown@gazettenet.com.