Ariel Barnes is known for his impeccable musicianship and luxurious tone. But when the Georgia Straight reaches him to talk about Music on Main’s first annual Music for the Winter Solstice concert, the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra’s principal cellist sounds, briefly, more like a nervous cartoon coyote.

“Heh heh heh,” says Barnes, when asked what’s on the program for the December 12 show. But he quickly composes himself and admits, ever so diplomatically, that he doesn’t quite know.

“There’s a beautiful sense of things really starting to materialize in their own natural way,” he explains. “That’s an element that often comes into play when you’re bringing together original music that’s being composed for an event and various players from different backgrounds. Some material is finished earlier, and some material’s put on the stand wet, so to speak.”

Caroline Shaw, Music on Main’s composer in residence and another featured performer in Music for the Winter Solstice, concurs. “Definitely, parts of the program are still TBD, very much,” the Pulitzer Prize–winning singer and violinist says, on the line from her New York City office. “But the anchor of the idea is a concert that is sort of winter-themed, but that’s an alternative to a Christmas concert, or that’s perhaps a Christmas concert without being self-consciously so. Another idea is that every year we’ll have different composers create little winter carols, so that over time we’ll build up this collection of different winter carols that are part of Music on Main, and part of Vancouver.

“Alfredo Santa Ana has already written one, composed out of a lot of very beautiful different textures,” she adds. “And then mine is actually much more folky. It’s really more like a folk song, and then the refrain is a round, which I’m going to teach the audience. I’m really excited about that.”

There are more facts we can glean, either from Music on Main’s website or from conversing with Shaw and Barnes. Joining the composer and the cellist on-stage will be Barnes’s partner in the Couloir duo, harpist Heidi Krutzen, along with pianist Rachel Iwaasa and singer Steve Maddock. Audience participation, if not mandatory, will be encouraged. Shaw will likely amplify her violin and use an electronic looper to create segues from piece to piece. And a few parts of the program are already fixed, beyond the carols from Shaw and Santa Ana. Iwaasa will play some piano music by Franz Schubert; Shaw will join her for Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel, for piano and violin; and Couloir will perform Close, a work commissioned from Quebec composer and harpist Caroline Lizotte, who wrote it while in Edinburgh to perform with the Montreal Symphony Orchestra.

“She became very inspired by the history of Scotland, and by Celtic history in general,” says Barnes. “And so she wrote us a work that’s essentially a Celtic suite. It’s based on the ideas of war and brotherhood, and also on a Robbie Burns tune [“A Man’s a Man for A’ That”], which ends up closing the piece in a very peaceful, harmonious way. It’s about the idea that people come together against all odds, or at times when we recognize the importance of communication and being together.”

Barnes adds that sharing a social moment during this time of short, grey days and long, dark nights is one of the best reasons to attend Music for the Winter Solstice. “The idea of people coming together has always really appealed to me,” he says. “I’ve always really enjoyed that spirit and that energy, and I think that’s very much what this concert represents. It just feels great to congregate indoors and engage in something together.”

Shaw agrees, and goes even further: she wouldn’t be where she is today, at the tender age of 32, were it not for sharing her music with others and receiving their instantaneous, even visceral feedback. Her Pulitzer-winning score, Partita for 8 Voices, draws directly on her experience of playing for dance classes, which apparently encouraged her to add more sensuality and physicality to her compositional palette.

“I was really confused about the world of classical music for a while, right after finishing school,” says Shaw, who has a master’s degree in violin performance from Yale. “But I completely fell in love with music again when I played for dance classes. I didn’t really have a composition teacher—that’s something which I avoided, consciously—and those dance classes and dancers kind of became my teacher, in a way. I just started to think about music very physically. Changes in texture, I think, are really, really strongly felt by dancers—more than the particulars of a clever harmonic shift or a clever rhythmic idea. Sometimes it’s just a simple change in texture or change in harmony that they feel the most strongly, and that was one of the best lessons in music I’ve ever had.”

Warmth, then, might be one of the defining characteristics of Shaw’s work—and although that’s in short supply this time of year, Music for the Winter Solstice should be as cheering as a blazing bonfire on a chilly night.

Music on Main presents Music for the Winter Solstice at Heritage Hall on Friday (December 12).