The Boston Public Quartet (BPQ) will honor the musical legacies of five distinguished female composers when it presents “A Radical Welcome: Source Code” at the Strand Theatre on Thurs., May 22.

The works of Melanie Bonis (1858-1957), Amy Beach (1867-1944), Gabriela Lena Frank (b. 1972), Eleanor Alberga (b. 1949), and Jessie Montgomery (b. 1981) will be at center stage in a performance that features audience participation as central to the event.

After each piece is played, the musicians will moderate conversations with their listeners meant to explore where the music came from and what it means to them.

“The entire event is all about the audience perspective versus the performer’s perspective, which can be a new experience,” said BPQ founder, and Quartet violinist, Betsy Hinkle. “To be able to use your own voice in a concert hall is a very new thing, so it won’t just be getting a program, sitting there quietly, and listening. There’s going to be an exchange of ideas, and the audience will get a chance to communicate in real time.”

She added: “We offer everyone at the opening of the concert a piece of card stock and a pencil and invite them to react to the music, to journal, to draw a picture, and then offer them another time in the concert where they get to share that.”

During last year's show, one woman wrote a poem in the middle of a performance and shared it with the audience later in the performance. Hinkle and her fellow BPQ members, Grant Houston, violin; Joy Cline Phinney, piano; Jason Amos, violist; and Nicholas Johnson, cellist, hope this year’s show will bring much of the same enthusiasm to the Strand that evening, when they will be joined by a guest artist, the flutist DeShaun Gordon-King.

“That’s really what the whole idea is of the entire event, the interaction, the conversation, the dialogue between audience and performer,” said Hinkle.

Since its founding some 18 years ago, BPQ has regularly welcomed guest artists to join them in their mission to amplify historically underrepresented voices in classical music.

The event in May will also include performances by students from Boston-based musiConnects and Brockton’s Rose Conservatory.

“It’s central to our mission to perform for the neighborhoods that we want to engage and where we live and the neighborhoods where our students and families come from,” Hinkle told The Reporter. “Especially since we often play Black and Latinx performers that we’re performing in the spaces in Boston where most of those communities live.”

To further diversify the world of classical music through accessibility, noted Hinkle, all tickets for the show are “pay what you want to. The idea is that we don’t want to have any barriers to the experience; however, it’s also very important that the arts be something that we all value and that value can come from money and other areas as well.

“Some people are very used to paying for a performance like we’re giving, and others would like to contribute but can only contribute a certain amount,” she said. “We want to make it as open and accessible as possible while still being able to fund the event and make it sustainable for the future.”

Tickets are available at bostonpublicquartet.com.