The March concerts by the Quad City Symphony Orchestra feature just one work, and the imposingly somber title alone might give their potential audience pause: War Requiem. It is a difficult and complex work, and a mammoth undertaking for the symphony and its performance partners. But understanding composer Benjamin Britten’s goals and methods can illuminate the experience of his anti-war masterwork and help attendees make the most of this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

I expected musical love in the Quad City Symphony Orchestra’s Valentine’s concert on February 11, but I was surprised where I found it.

Guest conductor Alondra de la Parra programmed familiar “romantic” music in Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakoff’s symphonic narrative of Scheherazade (a princess whose beguiling stories prevented her execution and ultimately led to marriage) and Maurice Ravel’s Bolero, made popular by the sexy comedy 10. Yet Spanish composer Joaquin Rodrigo’s guitar concerto – inspired by his wife – and a rousing and unexpected Latin American encore captured my musical heart.

Less than a minute into In Tall Buildings’ 2010 self-titled debut is a moment that hints at Erik Hall’s cut-and-paste method. New vocal lines burst abruptly from beneath the previous ones, as if overeagerly jumping their cue. But the music is so carefully constructed that it’s obvious this was a choice rather than a mistake, and the effect in an otherwise patient and gentle song is the understanding of a clear vision behind the music.

The album was crafted over four years, Hall said in a phone interview this week promoting his February 15 performance at Rozz-Tox. “I didn’t push it at all,” he said. “I didn’t work on it unless something came to me, unless I had an idea that I knew I wanted to apply to the music that I was already working on. So it was very gradual.”

While the album’s gestation period was long by music-industry standards, Hall’s composing and recording approaches were particularly unusual. He started out with a backbone – a chord progression or rhythmic pattern – and recorded it for the final product. “That’s it,” he said. “It’s not like a demo. ... Sometimes I have to sit and live with that for a good while before I figure out where the vocals are going to come from, what the song is going to be about, and what else sonically it needs.” He added with a laugh: “That can take anywhere from a week to a year.”

For Wet Hair singer and keyboardist Shawn Reed, being experimental is the only thing he can do. “Unless it’s weird and challenging, I’m just bored with it,” he said in a phone interview this week. “It just doesn’t feel important to me.”

The surprise of last year’s In Vogue Spirit was that the Iowa City band produced a batch of songs that was – for it – downright poppy.

That might seem like a contradiction unless you’re familiar with Wet Hair’s previous work, or the output of Reed’s and bandmate Ryan Garbes’ previous noise-rock outfit Raccoo-oo-oon. Pitchfork.com wrote that “in both Raccoo-oo-oon and Wet Hair, Garbes and Reed have been uncompromising in their pursuit of the outer limits. ... That hasn’t changed. But with In Vogue Spirit, Garbes and Reed have delivered a more consistent, considered record. Space is still the place, but they’ve found shortcuts to getting there.”

When the quartet Deleted Scenes recorded its second album, Young People’s Church of the Air, the atmosphere was “intense and pressurized,” resulting in a “doomed energy,” singer/guitarist/co-songwriter Dan Scheuerman has said.

In an interview this week promoting his band’s February 3 performance at Rozz-Tox, Scheuerman elaborated on those intriguing phrases. To start, the recording period was more compressed than for the band’s debut, he said: “We wanted the record to have a moment. Instead of being recorded over a year, it was recorded over more like three months. In that sense, it’s more identifiable as one piece of work.”

But the time frame was just one factor. “There was a weird vibe going on in the studio,” Scheuerman said. Producer L. Skell “is hard to read. So there was a lot of silence and glowering ... . And so we’d go in a direction and not be sure what was going on. And then when things seemed dark and we weren’t getting anywhere, everything would sort of snap together and ... [Skell] would come up with one or two really amazing suggestions to focus everything. There was a sense of ominousness to the proceedings, and that I think created a sense of doom. And there’s also a bit of doom in the songwriting as well. ... There was a high degree of tension.”