America is a melting pot in every sense of the word. Representative of an array of races and cultures, it produced over time its own unique musical heritage now known as “roots music.”

Saturday, four renowned members of the musical group Hesperus will explore American music from the Colonial era through the 20th century in its aptly titled production “American Roots.”

Hesperus has visited the University several times in the past, but this performance itself is entirely new to the Classic City.

“Hesperus is what I call a bunch of collaborative artists,” said Tina Chancey, the director of Hesperus and a performing member. “Basically, our job is to bring the past into the present by collaborating with world music, film and theater.”

Chancey, a classically trained musician, was inspired to transform historic music into the present after her musical studies at both Oberlin and Queens College.

“I went to Oberlin to study music history for three years, but then I relocated to New York because everyone there was actively playing and writing and getting their music performed,” she said.

Hesperus was founded in 1979 and has gone on to garner a substantial amount of national fame and recognition, even serving as an ensemble-in-residence at Georgetown University in 1987, Chancey said.

“It’s really hard not to become interested in historical music in Washington, D.C. because it’s everywhere,” she explained. “There are so many museums and old buildings, and we got to wanting to play the old music people played back then.”

Saturday night’s quartet ensemble will include Zan McLeod on guitar, banjo and mandolin, Chancey on viola da gamba and fiddle, Molly Andrews as a traditional singer and clog dancer and Elizabeth Baber as a classical soprano singer. With this wide range of instruments in town, the group’s performance will attempt to fuse Old World classical music with New World folk music.

“Early music and American roots music had something in common – each goes right for the gut,” Chancey said. “Whatever it is, you know what they’re feeling right away, and it just hits you.”

Performance selections will encompass a wide variety of genres from over three centuries of American music.

“There’s a little bit of Irish, swing, the blues, Appalachian ballads and a lot of old-time music and its roots,” Chancey said. Hesperus will alternate this with earlier European music for the concert.

The ensemble will also perform topical ballads, which Chancey describes as poems that discuss a controversial issue within an era, such as women’s suffrage and slavery, that are “set to a tune that everybody knew.”

More than anything, Chancey and the rest of Hesperus strive to emphasize the connections between early roots music and the popular music of today.

“Elvis, the Rolling Stones, Jefferson Airplane, Bob Dylan, everyone from the ’70s – they all went right to old-time music and blues for inspiration,” she said. “All music is connected, so what we’re doing is spotlighting those connections.”

“American Roots” is a two-part production with a brief intermission and Hesperus’ latest recording, a collection of colonial songs entitled “An Early American Quilt,” will be sold at the concert.