Violinist, vocalist, and composer Carla Kihlstedt has traversed styles and defied hierarchies for her entire career. She came into her own in the Bay Area in the mid-90s and now lives near Boston, teaching improvisation at the New England Conservatory of Music. You may know Kihlstedt as a member of wild San Francisco art-rock band Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, or as a trusted collaborator of veteran experimental guitarist Fred Frith. She maintains the improvising project Minamo with Japanese free-jazz pianist Satoko Fujii, and in the projects that she masterminds she often draws from literature—in 2008 she presented Necessary Monsters, inspired by the work of Jorge Luis Borges, at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.

Carla Kihlstedt and ICE perform “Against Dreaming,” the fifth movement of At Night We Walk in Circles and Are Consumed by Fire, at last month’s Ecstatic Music Festival in New York. Watch video of all nine movements.

Is that initially what you thought you would be doing? That kind of career?

You know that the members of ICE have worked with a really diverse group of composers. You or Tyshawn Sorey or whatever—they’re very open. I’ve seen plenty of their performances, and it seems like they relish the challenge of someone coming in and saying, “Can we do this? Is this possible?” It does seem like you’re going back to your classical roots, but I saw the video on the ICE site, and it sounds like your music, you know?

Because it had such a long time to germinate, it’s kind of a combination of things that come from the language that I’ve been developing and their own influence.

Were you composing much at Oberlin? Because a lot of it sounds like it’s come out of the rock and improv stuff that you’ve done over the years. They seem like songs, and I don’t mean that in a pejorative sense or anything, because I come out of rock. I just wonder if doing stuff that’s more “classical,” is that something you’re not interested in?

And I was chasing other people that did it before me, like Fred Frith, who also has made a career out of anchoring many different influences within his own writing. I don’t feel like a pioneer in that way. I feel like I had great role models.

Sat 2/16, 7:30 PM, Museum of Contemporary Art, $28, $22 MCA members, $10 students. All ages.