Telegraph String Quartet melds the avant-garde and traditional at a Carmel Music Society concert.

Telegraph String Quartet cellist Jeremiah Shaw grew up absolutely immersed in music – everyone in his family played an instrument.

“I started on cello when I was 7, and it’s been my only instrument,” Shaw says. “My two brothers started on piano. One moved to drums and then to percussion. And my mom was a piano teacher. And my dad, Clyde Shaw, was actually a professional cellist,” he says. “He was a founding member of the Audubon String Quartet.”

The Audubon, founded in 1974, was an internationally acclaimed American string quartet with a career that spanned some 37 years. The elder Shaw coached his son in how to master the instrument and conquer the massive music repertoire for string quartet – and also exposed him to another side of being a musician.

“He used to say that anyone who can play can be a cellist in a string quartet,” Shaw remembers, “but he taught me that there’s a big difference between playing cello in a string quartet and being a professional cellist playing in a professional string quartet. It’s the difference between being accomplished musicians playing great compositions, and becoming serious and disciplined about every single detail and nuance that creates the highest expression of that music.”

As such, the Telegraph rehearse five days a week, and they all teach and play with students of all ages as artists-in-residence at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. They have become known as strong purveyors of non-traditional, modern, avant-garde classical compositions, plus the very best of the traditional canon.

The quartet’s program in Carmel this weekend reflects that attitude, with Maurice Ravel’s vigorous, at times even turbulent Quartet in F Major (1903) sandwiched between the traditionality of Franz Joseph Haydn’s lyrical and lilting Quartet in F Major, Op. 50, No. 5, “Dream” (1787) and the pain and ultimate release of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Quartet No. 15 in A Minor, Op. 132, composed in 1825.

Next year, the ensemble will celebrate their 10th anniversary together.

“I think the glue that has held us together for so long is a mutual admiration and love for the string quartet art form,” Shaw says.

TELEGRAPH STRING QUARTET 3pm Sunday, Nov. 6. Sunset Center, San Carlos and 9th, Carmel $45-$60. 625-9938, carmelmusic.org