Black Violin was originally scheduled to perform at the Performing Arts Center on Wednesday, August 23, but due to a family emergency the concert has been rescheduled for next summer.

Wilner Baptiste and Kevin Sylvester never intended to be headliners. Though they’re scheduled to raise the roof of the Performing Arts Center next Wednesday, the duo, who are known on stage as Black Violin, originally hoped to achieve fame behind the scenes.

“We just started dreaming, you know, just thinking of ourselves as major producers,” Mr. Baptiste said in a phone call with the Gazette. “And we were huge fans of hip hop at the time, with major producers like Timbaland and The Neptunes, so that was the goal.”

The pair, who first met in 1996 in their second-period high school orchestra class, decided to move in together and chase their dream.

“After college, we just started producing and working with artists, and we would perform on the side at clubs in Miami, really just to make a little cash on the side,” he explained. But the crowds liked their hip hop-classical sound, which led to a role reversal.

“We work with different producers, and what we like to do, we talk to producers and we tell them, listen, we want to hear some of the hardest hitting beats that you can possibly let us hear, you know, we don’t want anything that has strings in it... Something that one of the roughest rappers would want, we want that, because we’re going to make it beautiful.”

He continued: “We were hip hop before we were classical, so it was natural to put the two together, to try to marry the two. And that’s what hip hop is all about, it’s about expressing, and we just took this instrument that we knew, that we learned, that we studied, and expressed ourselves with this instrument.”

Mr. Baptiste plays viola and Mr. Sylvester is on violin. For inspiration, they cite a wide range of sources, including Dmitri Shostakovich, Stevie Wonder and Kendrick Lamar.

“People can expect a high energy show, basically a rock concert from a violin perspective. You know, a lot of dancing, a lot of moving around. And if you want to enjoy real music, real good music, and if you want to see something you’ve never seen or heard before, this is the show for you.”